One of the most significant commonalities among the 2001 class of Sun’s iForce™ Heroes is their reliance on Sun software, hardware, and services as the technological foundation of their path-breaking Internet initiatives. Their choice of Sun was more than a happy coincidence.

Mark Dickelman of the Bank of Montreal, for one, decided early on to move his bank’s wireless operations from Windows NT to the Sun Solaris platform. “Sun has focused on delivering really world-class scalable server solutions, and has done some of the earliest and broadest thinking about how to make mobile Internet technologies work,” he says. “In my opinion, none of Sun’s competitors has had the same level of focus.” Similarly, Pam Scanlon of San Diego’s ARJIS reports that her organization chose Sun because of the performance of its products, and “with 10,000 police officers using our system, a high level of performance was vital.”

Other organizations have relied on the power and flexibility offered by Sun software, particularly Java™ technnology. In fact, many of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s key applications, says CEO Ernie Allen, are Java™ technology-based, a standard that enables a wide range of law enforcement agencies and private citizens to access the National Center’s web sites. Likewise, since late 1999, Japan’s DoCoMo has been working with Sun to enrich the DoCoMo browser with Java™ technology because of Java™’s ability to make dynamic the content that is so central to DoCoMo’s value proposition. And Brazil’s Sydeco developed its sales system using Java™ technology, enabling the company to quickly create a prototype and to easily adapt it as the company learned more about its salespeople’s needs.

But perhaps Mark Benioff, the chairman of Salesforce.com, best summarizes the reasons that this year’s iForce™ Heroes have relied so heavily on Sun technology and services. “We chose Sun” as the core of Salesforce’s infrastructure, he says, “because we knew it would be able to deliver the kind of quality and reliability we needed.” In a world where Internet-based solutions are being viewed with an ever more probing eye, that kind of quality and reliability are proving essential in building “the New Internet” and in delivering the bottom-line benefits that are transforming the Internet, at last, from its roots as a technological curiosity into an increasingly vital centerpiece of everyday business operations.

The iForce™ Initiative – To help its customers move quickly and efficiently into the dot-com economy, Sun has created the iForce™ initiative, a set of products, services, and solutions from Sun and its strategic partners. Read more about these and other iForce™ initiatives at www.sun.com/iforce-heroes.

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