SAS and Sun Launch New Initiative to Deliver Business Intelligence Innovation to Datacenters

SAS and Sun Unveil Reference Architectures to Help Customers Streamline Implementation for Faster, More Accurate Data Analysis.

CARY,, NC SANTA CLARA, CA.- Leveraging their 20-year strategic partnership, SAS and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced a new initiative to help organizations establish an enterprise-wide analytic architecture built on a highly available, scalable, secure and cost-effective platform. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform Powered by Sun’s Datacenter of the Future (DcoF) helps organizations better manage, optimize and enhance current and future SAS and Sun IT infrastructures throughout the enterprise.

To help organizations increase business performance while reducing the cost and complexity of business intelligence solutions in the datacenter, SAS will leverage Sun’s IT infrastructure, including hardware, software and services, as part of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform running on the open source Solaris operating system (OS). The architectures can run on virtually any of Sun’s award-winning hardware systems, from x64 servers to highly powerful compute-intensive servers.

“Launching this initiative together, SAS and Sun spotlight the need to align IT with business needs,” said Claudia Imhoff, President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. “IT determines how well an enterprise analytical platform can be built and utilized, which impacts how successfully a company can provide the accurate intelligence demanded in today’s competitive environment.”

As part of the initiative, Sun and SAS also unveiled a customer-accessible online Knowledge Center to house reference architectures, white papers and best practices. The reference architectures help customers accelerate deployment of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform on Sun systems by ensuring interoperability and scalability with existing and future strategic business environments. Additionally, Sun and SAS will collaborate on joint engineering, marketing efforts and global sales efforts.

“The SAS and Sun Datacenter of the Future initiative provides IT and executive managers the continuity, security, data privacy, compliance and performance so critical to enterprise customers,” said Keith Collins, Chief Technology Officer at SAS. “Our goal is to ensure businesses have optimal configurations of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform on Sun systems that are eco-friendly. This will accelerate the successful deployment of business intelligence throughout organizations more quickly and efficiently.”

Today’s announcement furthers SAS and Sun’s long-standing partnership that offers enterprises industry-leading business intelligence solutions optimized to run on the world’s most open and scalable hardware and the open source Solaris OS. For access to their newest joint initiative, Sun and SAS are offering customers a joint “try and buy” program, and grid computing and high availability assessments. Additional information about the initiative is available through an on-demand Webcast: www.sas.com/events/partners/153469.

“Mission-critical computing has been the core of Sun’s business for over 30 years. By combining the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform with Sun servers and the highly secure, open source Solaris OS, Sun and SAS have created the ideal platform for eliminating risk on SAS Enterprise deployments,” said Juan Carlos Soto, Vice President of Market Development at Sun. “With this new initiative, customers can quickly deploy a highly available, scalable, secure and cost-effective enterprise intelligence solution.”

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW. www.sas.com
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- “The Network is the Computer” -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.