---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash Nippon Steel Selects Sun as Integration Partner SunFLASH Vol 65 #74 May 1994 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Electronic Journal For Sun Users Since 1988 John J. Mclaughlin, Publisher & Editor - flash@sun.com ____________________________________________________________________________ 65.74 Nippon Steel Selects Sun as Integration Partner The SunIntegration business unit of the SunService division of Nihon Sun Microsystems K.K. today announced it has been chosen by Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC) to provide comprehensive expertise, education, tools and consulting services as part of a multi-million dollar rightsizing program. (145 lines) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following announcement was made earlier today, May 27, 1994, by SunIntegration. If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please contact Rob Aronoff, Marketing Manager of SunIntegration, at (415) 688-9479. NIPPON STEEL CORPORATION CHOOSES SUN AS ITS STRATEGIC RIGHTSIZING PARTNER TOKYO -- May 27, 1994 -- The SunIntegration business unit of the SunService division of Nihon Sun Microsystems K.K. today announced it has been chosen by Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC) to provide comprehensive expertise, education, tools and consulting services as part of a multi-million dollar rightsizing program. This is the first large contract for SunIntegration in the Japanese market and demonstrates the rapidly growing interest by Japanese companies in rightsizing their computing environments and re-engineering their business processes to stay competitive. SunIntegration has provided similar rightsizing expertise and services to many other leading companies elsewhere in the world. In addition to its growing track record with other leading companies, SunIntegration was chosen by NSC as its strategic rightsizing partner because of the effective techniques and tools applied in Sun Microsystems' own rightsizing efforts. NSC's commitment to rightsizing itself will involve the investment of a significant amount of dollars in hardware, software and service expenditures throughout the rest of this decade, focusing on open systems/client-server computing products from companies like Sun. NSC has a long-standing relationship with Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation as a major reseller of its products in Japan. NSC is the first major Japanese corporation to rightsize its IT operations by going directly to an open, distributed model based on UNIX, from a mainframe-based network. "We looked at Sun's commitment to open commercial computing and its rightsizing model and we see them as an excellent match for our own needs and the needs of the Japanese marketplace," said NSC board director, Tsuneyoshi Nishi. Long-term Rightsizing Effort In the first stage of the rightsizing partnership, SunIntegration Services will host trainers from Nippon Steel's Electronics Division at SunService training centers in the United States. Education will focus on running mission-critical applications reliably in a distributed environment, and will include architectural design, systems management, application development and deployment, continuous technology innovation and change management. This intensive training will enable NSC staff to retrain more than 6,000 NSC employees in Japan. The two companies will also collaborate in NSC's internal pilot projects, for which SunIntegration will provide additional technical and system architecture consulting services. Upon completion of the pilots, rightsizing projects will be evaluated for other NSC locations. As part of the deal, Nippon Steel negotiated the right to purchase Sun's middleware and Sun(R) Enterprise Toolset(TM) software tools, including SunRAI(TM), SunDANS(TM), Sun Paperless Reporter(TM) tools, Sun ConsoleServer(TM) and Sun DataCenter Scripts(TM). NSC will also use SunIntegration to source other third party tools that are not currently available in Japan. "This is one of the most significant developments in the Japanese business computing environment and we are very excited to be the provider of systems integration expertise and a partner in this project," said Bill Coleman, general manager of SunIntegration. "Along with this experience in rightsizing a major Japanese corporation, we intend to work toward a longer-term partnership aimed at other significant opportunities in the market." Sun Microsystems' Own Rightsizing Success Sun Microsystems uses its own hardware and software products to deliver products and services to its customers throughout the world. Sun's network of 28,000 nodes spans 50 countries, supports over 300 production applications, 600,000 daily transactions, and in excess of 1,000,000 daily e-mails. The use of Sun's client/server architecture and products, and its partnerships with hardware and software vendors, has made it able to change its business practices rapidly to meet the needs of its customers. During the past four years, Sun's rightsizing effort and continual business practice improvement has increased its cash position at year end from under $400 million in FY90 to over $1.1 billion in FY93. It increased its inventory turns from 6 to nearly 12 and shortened the time to collect on a sales order from 67 days to 45 days. In the same time, Sun improved its revenue per employee from just over $200,000 to more than $325,000. In 1993, Sun enjoyed the highest revenue per employee for any computer company employing a predominantly direct-sales business model, and amongst the highest revenue per employee of any company in the computer industry. About Nippon Steel Nippon Steel Corporation is a world leader in steel and metal manufacturing, with revenues of $26 billion per year. Nippon Steel Corporation's Electronics and Information Systems Division Group is one of Japan's fastest-growing and most accomplished distributed computing solution providers. Nippon Steel is headquartered in Tokyo, with offices all over the world. About SunService SunService, a Sun Microsystems, Inc. business, provides IT consulting, systems integration, comprehensive systems support and education services to end users of Sun products worldwide. With headquarters in Milpitas, Calif., it began operating as a separate subsidiary on July 1, 1993. SunIntegration Services is a division of SunService and one of the leading service and integration providers in the open, distributed, client-server computing environment. ### Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, SunService, the SunService Logo, SunIntegration Services, Sun Enterprise Toolset, SunDANS, SunRAI, Sun Paperless Reporter, SunConsole Server, Sun DataCenter Script, are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell, Inc. All other product or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.