SANTA CLARA, Calif. - December 14, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), the creator and leading advocate of Java technology, today announced the availability of the Sun Java Studio Enterprise 7 development platform. This release offers a virtually unmatched new "Code-Aware" collaboration technology to enable teams of developers to work together more effectively in today's distributed world. The Sun Java Studio Enterprise 7 product also delivers an array of functions including innovative capabilities for modeling and tuning enterprise applications all in a single, tightly integrated enterprise development environment. The product can be downloaded at http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/jsenterprise.

"The Java Studio Enterprise 7 product is a landmark release, offering an incredibly rich environment at a cost of just a few dollars per developer for Java Enterprise System users," said Joe Keller, vice president, marketing, Java Web Services and Development Platforms, Sun Microsystems. "This release can help global teams of developers and architects to effectively collaborate to bring high-caliber, enterprise-grade, fully tuned applications to market faster than ever."

The new release includes three major features that were not available in previous releases:

• "Code-Aware" Collaboration, which enables distributed teams or workgroups to interact and work dynamically together in a highly productive manner.
• Comprehensive support for the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which reduces complexity and increases visual clarity across software development projects, ensuring a sound architecture is established and communicated throughout the enterprise.
• An Application Profiler, which provides a powerful and efficient means of analyzing application performance, enabling developers to identify and resolve potential performance-related issues well before any production deployment.

What Developers Are Saying

"The Web Application Framework and refactoring features available in the new Java Studio Enterprise 7 development platform effectively accelerated my productivity with the cool, dynamic Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) pattern-and-view-bean generation, making the building of my company's Web applications really, really easy," said Belinda Garcia, senior member of the technical staff, Sandia National Laboratories.

"The UML features in the Java Studio Enterprise 7 product have the tightest integration with the overall development toolset that I have seen in the industry," said David Harrison-Jones, lead developer, PSBAS, a firm specializing in Sarbanes-Oxley software development. "I am also constantly surprised by the number of enhanced UML features like in-built design patterns and the latest UML diagram features for communication. I am very pleased to see that Sun is listening to developers who need to work smarter."

"Our project teams, which have been using the early access release, are particularly excited about the team collaboration and round-trip UML modeling capabilities in the Java Studio Enterprise 7 development platform," said Marc Maselli, president of Back Bay Technologies, Inc., a professional services firm. "These teams are seeing significant performance improvements based on the collaboration technologies, which help us ensure higher productivity and synchronization when developers are working in dispersed teams."

"We have used the Enterprise Application Profiler feature in the Java Studio Enterprise development platform to effectively understand performance bottlenecks in our application," said Kalyan Balakrishnan, Project Manager, Satyam Computer Services Ltd. "We found the Load Generator facility extremely useful to interrogate the behavior of our application in the presence of production type loads, enabling us to improve performance and avoid potential production problems during the development cycle."

Java Studio Enterprise is the first comprehensive development environment to speed development of applications with a compelling collection of interfaces all targeting the runtime version of the Sun Java Enterprise System. In addition, the Java Studio Enterprise product delivers a comprehensive collection of developer resources and support services via the Sun Developer Network (http://developers.sun.com).

Pricing and Promotions

Sun is currently offering a special competitive upgrade bundle. Developers can purchase the Sun Java Studio Developer promotional bundle, with the Sun Java Studio Enterprise 7 development platform and Sun Java Studio Creator software for $995 USD (U.S. list price). This special promotion is available at the "Programs and Promotions" link at http://store.sun.com until June 30, 2005 as an upgrade for users of other development environments. Customers can contact their Sun Microsystems sales representative for further details.

For more details on the Java Studio Enterprise product, the product datasheet is located at http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/jsenterprise/datasheet.html.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) 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 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, Solaris, J2EE and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.