Sun Expands Network.com On-Demand Application Offerings

New Network.com partner program helps ISVs bring applications to market faster.

SANTA CLARA, CA .- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced the addition of 14 new applications in the Network.com Application Catalog, a collection of online grid-enabled applications that are available from Network.com’s Sun Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis with “Click and Run” ease. Sun also announced a new partner program, “Sun Network.com Connection,” for independent software vendors (ISVs) to create and expand lucrative on-demand service offerings to end-users at a lower risk and cost with access to new channels. Additionally, Sun has expanded Network.com’s international availability with the Netherlands being the latest of the 25 countries worldwide from where its services can be utilized.

“An expanded catalog of over 40 applications from ISVs and open source communities covering a wide range of industry segments is not only increasing the diversity of the Network.com’s portfolio of pay-per-use services but also attracting more developers and end-users to use, build and share new services,” said Mark Herring, Senior Director of Software Marketing. “Network.com is providing developers and ISVs with both flexible IT infrastructure resources and a robust portal for creating, publishing and accessing open source-based as well as ISV applications. With a growing collection of applications, a host of new developer tools and worldwide availability, Network.com is evolving into a virtual on-demand data center that allows businesses of any size to leverage compute infrastructure without the cost of ownership and with the flexibility of scaling up or down compute resources in real time as business demands change.”

The newly added applications in the catalog include open source application Blender, an integrated suite of tools for modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, creation and playback of interactive 3D content. Sun is sponsoring Blender Foundation’s open movie “Peach,” a short 3D animation by artists and developers in the Blender community, with grants of CPU-hours in Network.com. Other notable new open source applications are Zeus (a life sciences application), GAP (a computational mathematics application) and OOFEM (a computer aided engineering application). In addition to the powerful Solaris 10 Operating System (OS)-based grid platform, Network.com is providing developers and open source communities with tools, resources and an active grid developer community that helps them easily build and test on-demand applications. The complete list of Network.com’s open source as well as ISV applications in computational mathematics, engineering, design, financial services, rendering and animation, life sciences and other specialties can be found at http://www.network.com/application.html.

Network.com offers ISVs the application catalog to quickly and securely offer their applications to end-users and a Digital Entitlement Token system that gives ISVs the option of a new and flexible software licensing mechanism. Sun has launched a new “Sun Network.com Connection” partner program that allows ISVs to gain competitive advantage by publishing their on-demand applications to Network.com customers and jointly going to market with Sun, thereby shortening their sales cycles and enabling end-users with limited IT resources to gain immediate access to these applications. The details of this partner program are at http://www.sun.com/partners/ondemand.

Network.com customers of GAMS Development Corporation (http://www.gams.com) have immediate access to the intensive computational power needed for mathematical programming using GAMS, an application specifically designed for modeling linear, nonlinear and mixed integer optimization problems. “For us, Network.com is a secure and scalable compute infrastructure that our customers can easily use for lots of processing power without the burden of building and maintaining a data center,” said Alexander Meeraus, CEO of GAMS Development Corporation.

Scientists from many universities and leading research institutes are relying on Network.com for their compute infrastructure as they work on solving complex problems with massive computational needs. “Our research requires the use of large matrix computations involving huge data sets. Using Network.com and FreeMat, an interpreted matrix-oriented development environment available in Network.com Application Catalog, we are able to scale these intricate computations across large number of CPUs with significant reduction of the computation time,” said Dr. Amir Assadi, Professor of Mathematics at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are also doing research on the algorithms used in these computations and are inviting participation in our project in the Sun Grid Developer Community.” Dr. Bruno Sanso, Associate Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, and his team of researchers are using Network.com to run statistical applications for climate and environmental research.

About Network.com

Sun’s Network.com provides access to compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis via its Sun Grid compute utility at $1/CPU-hr. It is powered by the Solaris 10 OS and Sun Grid Engine running on Sun’s x64 hardware. CPU-hr is defined as the aggregate time spent across all CPUs and rounded up to the next hour. For more information, please see http://www.network.com.