Peter Cunningham, the former president of Unix International Inc, has turned up at the helm of European arm of SunIntegration Services. Like its US arm, which is headed by Bill Coleman, SunIntegration Services Europe has around 80 employees – a mixture of system architects, project engineers, programming managers and legal and administration staff. There are already 20 or so multi-million dollar European projects on the go at the moment for which Sun Microsystems Inc is providing integration services, according to Cunningham, including London Life in the UK, Deutsche Bank in Germany and L M Ericsson Telefon AB in Sweden. Sun says that it is not interested in any projects that do not include some element of Sun hardware, but once that is in place it will gladly handle and integrate personal computers, terminals, Cray Research or Amdahl Corp servers, and maybe even other hardware as well. It will also handle cabling, routers, peripherals and network traffic analysers. But the key element for Sun is networked middleware. It says it will put together systems using tools such as Oracle, Tivoli, NetLabs, OpenVision and the like, along with Systems Network Architecture and Open Systems Interconnection communications, and its own internal tools such as automatic software distribution and the SunRAI MVS to relational database bridge. SunIntegration Europe is based at Sun’s UK headquarters in Bagshot, Surrey, and it is in the process of setting up a presence in France, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. Cunningham says that the cycle time for business at his new charge is quite different from Sun’s usual quarter on quarter turnover, with contracts running over 18 months or so, but it hopes to increase turnover by 40% to 50% over the next few years. SunIntegration Services also has alliance partnerships with other systems integrators such as Control Data Systems Inc, Cambridge Technology Partners Inc and Unisys Corp.
