Business & Money Trail:

PLATFORM COMPUTING SUPPORTS SOLARIS 9

Platform Computing Inc, a leader in distributed computing software solutions, announced support for Solaris 9, Sun Microsystems' latest update to its leading UNIX Operating Environment.

Platform Computing will make its Load Sharing Facility (LSF) software solutions available on Solaris 9 platform enabling customers to fully maximize the use of their technical resources -- including applications, operating systems and hardware -- on a highly scalable, available, manageable and secure service delivery platform for the networked world, with proven lower cost of ownership. This announcement furthers an already strong and long-standing alliance between the two companies, ensuring customers of continued integration of their technologies and performance optimization benefits.

The Solaris 9 OE enables Platform Computing software developers to easily integrate applications through Solaris' open, extensible architecture when written to the Solaris Application Binary Interface. Because the Solaris environment provides this investment protection through binary compatibility with each release, joint Platform/Sun customers looking to upgrade to Solaris 9 will enjoy a smooth upgrade process while simultaneously charting a seamless path to the deployment of Web services. The Solaris 9 OE comes with a variety of security enhancements and meets developers' demand for improved performance and security, most notably a high speed, commercial grade firewall, SunScreen 3.2, that supports invisible Stealth mode, standard routing mode, and proxies, built right into the OE. These enhancements are very important to both Sun as well as Platform, as many joint customers are deploying distributed computing environments where security is a critical concern.

Together, Platform Computing and Sun will provide organizations with complete solutions that increase productivity, maximize revenue and profit, and significantly enhance customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention. Additionally, the Solaris environment can provide investment protection through binary compatibility between each release. Applications running on any previous generation SPARC/Solaris-based server will run with an added performance boost on the latest generation of Sun systems.

"By combining the Solaris 9 OE's power to run applications faster with Platform LSF enterprise workload management capabilities, we can significantly increase enterprise performance and boost utilization of IT resources," said Paul Hill, vice president, Marketing, Platform Computing. "For many of our joint customers, particularly in the EDA market, unplanned downtime can significantly impact productivity and time to market. With our integrated solutions, our customers can rest assured that they are running mission-critical operations in a robust, reliable infrastructure."

As a result of their collaboration, Platform and Sun have coupled the industry's most advanced distributed computing solutions with unprecedented levels of interoperability, security, and standards-compliance that characterize the new Solaris 9 operating system. In addition, Platform's support of Solaris 9 validates Platform's pledge to customers to support the widest range of heterogeneous computing platforms and operating systems.

About the Solaris 9 Operating Environment

The Solaris Operating Environment is the premier operating environment for the enterprise. With over 300 new features, Solaris 9 is the most scalable, available, manageable and secure service delivery platform for the networked world. By focusing on industry standards, the Internet, innovation and integration, Solaris 9 delivers a documented lower cost of operation. Solaris is the leading UNIX operating environment with 64 percent market share in shipments and 54 percent revenue share, according to Gartner Dataquest's "1Q02 Servers Quarterly Statistics."

The Solaris 9 OE is available on the SPARC Architecture platforms and supports more than 12,000 applications. Customers have access to many freeware programs, including utilities, productivity tools and development tools. In addition, the Solaris 9 OE offers an integrated Sun ONE Application Server and Sun ONE Directory Server, along with access to the Oracle 8i database.

About Platform LSF

Platform LSF provides on demand access to resources across the computeintensive environments in a wide range of markets including automotive, computer design and semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, finance, government and biotechnology. From a single cluster of Windows desktops, to Linux compute farms and worldwide grids of distributed systems, Platform delivers consistent performance and scalability in distributing and executing application workload. Platform ensures fair sharing of resources among engineers so that tasks are processed efficiently, workloads completed faster, and overall productivity is increased.

About Platform

Platform is the world's leading distributed computing software provider, with desktop to Grid solutions that allow organizations to dramatically improve time to market and quality of results, while maximizing their I.T. investment. Platform has strategic relationships with industry leaders including Compaq, HP, IBM, SGI, Sun, LION Bioscience and SAS and its open, scalable software solutions are the choice of more than 1,500 result-driven organizations around the world. Platform is a private company with 400 employees in 14 offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information visit www.platform.com.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.

Contact Platform Computing, Carolyn Luke, 905-948-8448, cluke@platform.com.