Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA, JAVA message board) announced that the company has signed a new multi-million dollar contract with Luxtera. Both companies will be cooperating in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program. The project will concentrate on development of next generation optical interconnects and produce chip-to-chip and intra-chip interconnect technology. This would provide low cost but high performance computer systems for the computing industry.
Ability to participate in such a project is an opportunity for both companies to take a lead position in the computing market. "We selected Luxtera for its proven technology and processes and overall expertise required for developing next-generation photonics technology for the UNIC program," said Dr. Jim Mitchell, Sun Fellow & VP, New Technology Adoption, of Sun Microsystems. "They have been extremely successful in the utilization of Silicon CMOS Photonics and delivering direct 'fiber-to-the-chip' connectivity in commercial products."
While this project is huge, Sun Microsystems had more news to announce today. The company has released Java(TM) Platform Standard Edition 6 Update 10 (Java SE 6u10). The update includes improved usability and performance of the Java platform.
Sun has also added new features such as ability to drag Java applets directly from the browser, run those applets as desktop widgets with more powerful and stylized application graphics. The product is now easier to install, has shortened startup time and offers new cross-platform look. With the new version, the company has addressed the needs of developers. The platform now has built-in Deployment Toolkit which ensures all users use the most recent Java SE version. A new plug-in provides independence from browsers and interoperability with web 2.0 technologies.
Furthermore, Sun has announced addition of two new server modules to its blade servers portfolio. The new systems will take advantage of the company’s own UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor along with Advanced Micro Devices’ quad-core Opteron chip.
With all these news on the table, the company’s stock still plummeted nearly 19% as the market opened on October 21, 2008, and shows no signs of recovery. This was caused by other announcement, made yesterday, concerning the company’s preliminary quarterly figures. The company reported they expect a decrease in revenues for the quarter ended September 28. The company’s losses for the quarter have been between $0.25 and $0.35 per share.
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president of Sun Microsystems commented on the situation: "Sun and its customers are seeing the impact of a slowing economy. We believe we are positioned to offer the kinds of products that can radically help customers reduce expenditures for their infrastructure from Open Storage to Solaris-based Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) systems to offering the most eco-efficient systems in the market."
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