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  Company Type Public ()
  Company Slogan The Network is the Computer
  Foundation 1982
  Location City Santa Clara, California
  Location Country United States
  Num Employees 34,600 (2007){{cite web
  Url http://suncom/aboutsun/company/factsjsp
  Title Company Info
  Accessdate 2007-07-30


  Revenue US$ 13873 billion ( FY07 ){{cite web
  Url http://wwwsuncom/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/pr/2007-q4html
  Title Q4 FY 2007 Earnings Press Release
  Accessdate 2007-01-23


  Operating Income US$309 million (FY07)
  Net Income US$473 million (FY07)
  Industry Diversified computer systems
  Products Computer Server s, Workstation s, Storage , software, and services
  Homepage http://suncom/


Sun is known as the developer of technologies such as the Java Platform and NFS , and as a key promoter of open systems in general and UNIX in particular; it has recently emerged as one of the leading proponents and contributors of Open Source software. Its products include computer Server s and Workstation s based on its own SPARC Processor s as well as AMD 's Opteron and Intel 's Xeon processors; Storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris Operating System , developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and Identity Management applications. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland .


HISTORY


The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto , California . He originally designed this "68000 Unix system" for the ''Stanford University Network'' communications project, building it from spare parts resourced from the Department Of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/sun_spotlight.html

  Url http://wwwtheregistercouk/2004/06/02/sun_shows_metropolis/
  Date 2 June 2004
  Title Sun goes back to the future with Metropolis
  Accessdate 2007-01-31
  Publisher The Register


  Url http://wwwsuncom/aboutsun/investor/faq/#04
  Title Sun Microsystems - Investor Relations: FAQ
  Accessdate 2007-01-23
  Publisher Sun Microsystems, Inc



Sun's logo, which features Four Interleaved Copies of the word ''sun'', was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt , also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.

The first Sun workstations ran a Version 7 Unix System port by UniSoft on 68000 processor-based machines.


The "Bubble" and its aftermath


During the Dot-com Bubble , Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by Venture Capital -funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun.
NASDAQ Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and their assets were auctioned off, a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. Much like Apple , Sun relied a great deal on hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs,345
executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In 2002 the share price returned to the 1998 pre-bubble level, a pattern of escalation and decline comparable to other companies in the sector, and has hovered in the single digits since then. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.6
In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.7


Higher level telecom control systems such as NMAS and OSS service predominantly use Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature and very stable version of the Unix operating system and the support service that Sun provides.


Present focus


In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high Instruction Level Parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for Multi-threading and Multiprocessing , such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (formerly known as "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japan ese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on 17 April 2007 as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series.

In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid , a Grid Computing deployment on which it offers Utility Computing services priced at $1 (US) per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, of which Sun claims to be able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first Software As A Service product.

In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14 2005 . In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.8

In recent years Sun's engineering work has become international, with substantial groups in Bangalore , Beijing , Hamburg , Prague , St. Petersburg and Grenoble .

A weekly summary of news about Sun and its products is posted to "System News for Sun Users",9
now in its 10th year.


Acquisitions