Sun Introduces Solaris Developer Kit for Intel to Speed Development of Applications On Solaris; Award-winning Sun Tools Help ISVs Easily Develop for Solaris on Intel Today

Business Wire, March 10, 1998

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 10, 1998--Following its recent agreement with Intel Corporation to put the Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) operating environment on Intel's powerful Merced processor when it becomes available, Sun Microsystems today announced the Solaris Developer Kit for Intel Edition.

With the Kit, developers can quickly develop applications today that will be compatible with and can easily be tuned for Solaris on Merced. The Kit contains the Solaris 2.6 operating environment, Sun's award-winning C and Java(TM) development tools, as well as white papers and other technical documentation. By choosing the Solaris operating environment, customers and developers gain a much faster and more reliable operating environment. In recent TPC-C benchmark tests, Solaris was 248 percent faster than Microsoft's Windows NT.

Although Solaris on Intel already enjoys strong support from the developer community, the Kit will accelerate availability of Solaris on Intel applications by making it easier for developers to build applications that solve large-scale, complex problems that Microsoft's Windows NT cannot address. Like the SPARC(TM) platform, the Intel platform is key to the corporate marketplace. Sun's aggressive push to speed the development of applications running on Solaris on Intel is designed to provide its customers and Intel-based Solaris system allies with a superior alternative to Microsoft's Windows NT for running enterprise applications.

"With Sub-$1,000 PC's and the low-cost Solaris Developer Kit, Sun could be exposing a massive market opportunity for small and individual developers. This is the same reasoning that brought developers to Microsoft's Windows and DOS in droves," commented J. P. Morgenthal, President of NC.Focus (www.ncfocus.com) an IT research and consulting group in Hewlett, NY.

The Kit contains Solaris 2.6 software for desktops as well as Sun's powerful, easy-to-use Sun(TM) Visual WorkShop(TM) C , Java(TM) WorkShop(TM) and Java(TM) Studio(TM) development tools. These are some of the industry's best tools for building performance-sensitive applications that showcase the power and reliability of the Solaris operating environment. The Solaris Developer Kit for Intel provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from which programmers can build, test and tune applications running on Solaris and Java technology. As part of Sun's continuing commitment to its developer community, the Kit is targeted at winning new application support from Microsoft's Windows NT, non-Solaris UNIX(R) operating environments, and Solaris SPARC developers.

"Businesses already turn to Adaptive Server as the platform of choice to power mission-critical applications because of its industry-leading performance and flexibility to adapt to meet changing business needs," said Terry Stepien, vice president, database marketing for Sybase, Inc. "Sun's new Solaris Developer Kit for Intel will enable our enterprise customers to more quickly develop applications that capitalize on the powerful combination of Adaptive Server and Solaris today, and easily port to Solaris on Merced when it becomes available."

"As the enterprise operating system market consolidates around the Solaris operating environment, developers are seeing a huge demand for Solaris on Intel applications that their customers can both put to use today and easily tune for Solaris on Merced when it becomes available," said Brian Gentile, vice president, market development, SunSoft. "With the Solaris Developer Kit for Intel, developers will have the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge of the Solaris operating environment, while leveraging Sun's enterprise-class tools to quickly and cost-effectively deliver applications on Solaris to market."

Sun and Intel Competency Centers Also Planned

To provide additional support for ISVs and Intel-based Solaris system allies, Sun and Intel plan to open competency centers around the world to assist developers in recompiling SPARC-based Solaris applications to run on Intel Merced, and in porting applications from other platforms to Solaris on Intel. Expected to open later this year, the centers will be staffed by personnel from Sun, Intel and Sun's system allies.

Solaris on Intel Momentum

Nearly 3,000 applications are available today for Solaris on Intel and hundreds more are in the process of being recompiled each month. All applications developed for Solaris are forward-compatible with the full 64-bit version of the Solaris operating environment.

Sun expects to deliver a 64-bit optimized version of Solaris software for Merced at the time of Merced-based system availability, expected in 1999, and is dedicated to expanding the use of Solaris on leading Intel computing platforms as well as SPARC computing platforms. Solaris on Merced will provide both full access to and interoperability with the existing base of 32-bit software and the expected performance-boosted IA-64 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

Availability

Interested software developers will be able to order the Solaris Developer Kit for Intel by the end of March. For more information or to place an order for the Solaris Developer Kit, please visit http://www.sun.com/developers/Intel.>