Under the terms of the agreement, Sun acquired substantially all of the assets of Critical Path’s mainframe rehosting business, including technology and software products for cash in an asset purchase transaction. Also as part of the agreement, Sun hired substantially all of Critical Path’s employees related to this business. This acquisition will be accounted for as a purchase, and the financial impact of this transaction on Sun’s earnings is expected to be immaterial.
While Sun has been successful in capturing new applications from mainframes because of Sun’s extensive ISV portfolio, many data centers still rely on in-house CICS back-end applications in markets such as insurance, banking, manufacturing, retail, and government. The acquisition will provide Sun with increased access to a large number of established, mainframe-centric customers.
Combined with the newly announced Sun Fire[tm] 15K server, the Critical Path mainframe rehosting middleware will enable companies to run their existing transaction processing and batch applications on Sun’s reliable, scalable, binary-compatible servers without rewriting their mainframe CICS code. This allows companies to reduce the high mainframe hardware and software costs without abandoning their existing investments in existing business rules and processes.
As part of the acquisition, Sun obtains Critical Path products, currently known as Trans, Batch, and PATH/3270 and will continue to provide support for the current installed base of customers running these software products in the near term. As the employees, sales teams, and support teams supporting the newly acquired Critical Path mainframe rehosting business are integrated into Sun’s Computer Systems Product Group, Global Sales organization, and Enterprise Services organization, they will begin developing formal product roadmaps and strategies that align with Sun’s overall product and business objectives.
Sun is a leading force in the high-end server arena and has years of experience in providing solutions for data centers running mainframe applications, which make this acquisition an excellent technological fit, said Steve Campbell, senior director of Enterprise Systems Marketing for Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. By incorporating this technology into our end-to-end services architecture, we continue to build upon Sun’s long history of mainframe interoperability expertise, significantly bolstering our solutions portfolio and enabling our customers to lower the operational costs of their data centers, while helping to ensure consistent, fast, secure, and reliable processing of their existing applications.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
