Sun Lands i-Planet

Sun Microsystems Inc. took
another step toward expanding its business outside its core workstation
market late Monday with the acquisition of privately-held i-Planet Inc.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

i-Planet provides secure Internet communications giving businesses secure
access to e-mail, internal data and applications from any
Internet-connected device without the expense of building a separate network.

“Sun’s vision of anyone, anytime, anywhere computing is coming
together in a viable end-to-end software architecture,” said Ed
Zander, chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc. “i-Planet
puts another unique software technology in the Sun arsenal that
provides remote access to the corporate intranet from any available
computer.”

David Vereeke, co-founder and president of i-Planet, expects the deal will
rapidly expand i-Planet’s market share.

“Sun’s leadership in the service provider industry positions it
to be able to quickly build market share for i-Planet technologies as
a natural extension of its industrial-strength Solaris operating
environment and award-winning Sun Internet Mail Server,” said David
Vereeke, cofounder and president at i-Planet.

“Further, the power of
our combined companies and technologies gives us some exciting
opportunities to play a critical role in accelerating the growth of
the global Internet market.”