Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Transforms core integration and messaging platform to service oriented architecture for greater business agility

A singular vision—"The Network Is The Computer"—guides Sun Microsystems in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the "Participation Age."

Customer Challenges

Reduce time to market by speeding IT project completion
Increase business agility
Stay in compliance with government regulations
Reduce technology lock in by adopting open standards
Develop and serve global accounts more effectively and efficiently
Maximize return on investment (ROI)

Solution

The Sun Microsystems IT organization is focused on evolving Sun's messaging and integration infrastructure using service oriented architecture (SOA). The new architecture will help Sun consolidate its existing enterprise applications, integrate disparate internal and external systems and deploy new composite-based applications and services that shorten development cycles and improve business agility.

Business Results

Expected improvement in business agility, including faster implementation of business process changes, regulatory compliance changes, outsourcing decisions and system integration following mergers and acquisitions
Projected increase in ROI of existing assets through reuse
Expected cost savings and greater flexibility through increased usage of open standards

Products and Services

Story Details

For Sun Microsystems and its customers, service oriented architecture (SOA) is the future of IT. Sun and its partners are leading the industry in bringing the benefits of this simpler, more cost-effective and more inclusive IT architecture to organizations worldwide. In addition, Sun has launched a large-scale internal project to transform its own core messaging and integration infrastructure for greater business agility with SOA.

Sun’s SOA transformation will streamline an infrastructure supporting both internal and external data transfer and exchange of information. The legacy infrastructure, which was originally developed in-house, has proved its ruggedness and reliability. It supports Sun’s major enterprise applications, including purchasing and order management, and annually handles more than 10 million transactions worth billions of dollars in business.

" At Sun, we are implementing service oriented architecture to increase the speed and quality of developing and deploying business applications. The new architecture allows us to rapidly create orchestrated applications, composite services and other reusable codes that will make our business more agile and better able to serve our customers. "

— Michael Ricigliano, Director of IT Infrastructure, Enterprise Messaging and Integration Services, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Through an internal project code-named IBIS, the company is consolidating its enterprise applications from 1,000 to 50 and standardizing on software packages from Oracle Corporation. That project has provided an opportunity to transform the infrastructure to an SOA, increasing flexibility and making it easier to support future applications. Sun plans to use SOA to supplement or extend present and future applications with new composite applications and services that can be reused and rapidly deployed to meet changing business needs.

Sun’s new SOA messaging and integration platform—the Sun Enterprise Messaging Service—will be more scalable and functionally robust than its predecessor. The new core messaging platform is based on the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). The Java Message Service Grid, an add-on to Java CAPS, provides a high-performance and highly available messaging bus for the new system and enables support for Sun Fire server clusters and networks.

Sun has created an internal governance board to oversee the deployment and development of the new messaging and integration platform. The company plans to transfer the knowledge gained to the many customers worldwide that it is guiding through similar SOA transformations.