Stratus Computer Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc yesterday announced a marketing and joint development agreement that will allow Stratus machines to act as file servers to Sun workstations. Stratus says the agreement will help it to compete in areas where the market requires the facilities of the workstation and Sun has been moving into the financial services market – it just signed a $5m OEM agreement under which CitiCorp’s Quotron unit will offer Sun workstations running a real-time financial analysis package as options to people signing for its Global Trading System; fault-tolerance is becoming a sine qua non in financial services. Stratus says that this is one of several planned strategic alliances; on the Sun side it comes under the Mountain View company’s Strategic Industry Partnership Program which also includes Sequent Computer Systems, Convex Computer and Culler Scientific. For those who have seen Sun solely as an engineering and scientific workstation vendor, the firm reveals that it has been marketing into financial services for some time – but there has been little publicity because most of its customers are still in the experimental stage.
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