Independent Analyst Firm Positions Sun in Leaders Quadrant for User Provisioning

Sun Announces Successful Identity Management Deployments and New Customers.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced that Sun has been positioned in the leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning, 2H07.1 Gartner places companies in the “Leaders” quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. In addition, Sun announced strong customer adoption of its comprehensive, market-leading portfolio of identity management solutions by AirFrance-KLM, BNSF Railway Company, EDS, and Towers-Perrin.

“Sun’s extensive customer roster demonstrates our leadership and ability to successfully deploy Sun’s Identity Management suite,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of marketing, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems. “We’ve been very focused on execution and have seen more and more enterprises turning to Sun for help managing and protecting their most important assets – their identities and identity data throughout the enterprise and beyond. As a result, Sun has been able to partner with its customers in ways that not only enhance overall security, but also offer business agility.”

Recognized as a global leader in identity management, Sun manages billions of user identities worldwide for companies in a variety of industries from financial services and transportation to government. Companies around the world rely on Sun identity management solutions to help provide provisioning and secure access capabilities, help ensure ongoing compliance and enable federation for sharing within as well as beyond enterprise boundaries.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company
BNSF Railway Company operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 32,000 route miles of track covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. The company manages an extensive technology infrastructure, including a wide variety of platforms, across three corporate offices and 300 remote locations throughout North America. Furthermore, many computer users work remotely on a contract basis, resulting in high turnover. BNSF turned to Sun Java System Identity Manager to manage user identities and access privileges that were previously processed manually using individual, resource-specific tools and a variety of homegrown solutions. The first phase of the successful deployment took only 45 days, enabling BNSF to automate the management of 40,000 user identities across the IT environment. Based on the latest version of Sun Java System Identity Manager, BNSF manages more than 100,000 user accounts across a broad range of enterprise resources. As a result, the company has improved turnaround time for provisioning by up to 50 percent; cut cost by more than 30 percent by automating traditionally manual, error-prone processes; and increased responsiveness and efficiency with the remote workforce while improving overall security.

“Being able to turn access off effectively and completely when a contractor leaves our company is critical to the security of our overall IT environment,” said Rick Perry, Director of Security, Compliance & Continuity, BNSF Railway Company. “Sun’s Identity Manager makes it possible to be more responsive to the frequent requests for service that you have when so many people come and go. We couldn’t efficiently manage that with the old method, and the process wouldn’t scale to meet future growth. Now, as we get more effective at managing accounts, we can be more responsive to our remote workforce. To have a single view of users and of all the places they have accounts is tremendous. We never had that before.”

EDS
EDS recently signed a three-year contract with Sun to provide a managed Sun Identity Management offering. With solutions from the Sun Java System Identity Management Suite, EDS will be able to better provide its clients an end-to-end strategy for managing, protecting, storing, verifying, and sharing identity data throughout an enterprise and across extranets. In addition, EDS will be embedding Identity Manager in its HR BPO Offering - ExcellerateHRO. ExcellerateHRO is the human resources outsourcing business of EDS and Towers Perrin. This strength, coupled with Sun’s innovative Identity Management portfolio, enables customers to manage their HR processes and programs efficiently and effectively. EDS will now be able to deliver the most comprehensive, open, and integrated Identity Management services on the market today.

Towers-Perrin
Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm, selected Sun Identity Management technologies to create a foundation for its security and compliance infrastructure. The solution includes a five-year subscription for use of the Sun Java System Identity Management Suite and the Solaris Operating System (OS). Towers Perrin selected the Sun software as the solution to meet its near-term internal security and compliance needs, as well as for later use on external customer-facing applications. The Sun solution gives Towers Perrin increased security, an automated process for employee provisioning, and lower total cost of ownership for external applications that help drive revenue.

Air France-KLM
Air France-KLM, the world’s leading airline group, selected the Sun Java System Identity Management Suite to improve authorization controls for its 100,000 employees, contractors and partners accessing the company’s internal and external networks on a daily basis. Air France-KLM’s new corporate authorization model increased overall security while reducing costs by delivering a more streamlined and automated authorization process. Furthermore, the Sun solution manages the identity lifecycle beyond basic network access, improving authorization on everything from physical access to buildings and rooms to advanced application access based on roles. Air France-KLM selected Sun based on the strength and reputation of the solution, depth of functionality and its ability to easily integrate with Air France-KLM’s existing IT infrastructure. Air France-KLM also engaged Sun Services to assist with the system deployment.

For more information on Sun’s identity management portfolio, please visit http://www.sun.com/software/products/identity.

1. Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning, 2H07” by Earl Perkins and Roberta J. Witty, August 23., 2007