Sun Microsystems Inc. has announced the official opening of the Asia South iForce Solution Center in Singapore. The US$5 million facility is one of four Sun-led centers worldwide, providing state-of-the-art Sun technologies that help partners build and test prototypes for customers.

"This is a significant milestone for Sun in Asia South. The opening of this center underpins Sun"s commitment to the potential of this region. The ready talent base and infrastructure, coupled with the fact that we are working towards a network computing hub here, makes it a natural choice to have this facility in Singapore," said Lionel Lim, vice president and managing director of Asia South, Sun Microsystems.

The Asia South iForce Solution Center showcases creative solutions, fuels innovations with partners and allows customers to test Sun and partner solutions before making an investment.

The Solution Center is designed to help customers reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership, while increasing productivity through the development and implementation of solutions that addresses business objectives. The center has a real-world environment that customers can leverage to quickly and securely solve integration challenges and promote interoperability across multi-vendor solutions. It also provides customers focused assistance with the entire solution implementation process, from brainstorming to developing pilot programs.

The center is supported by Sun"s partners in the region, including Applied Business Systems (Malaysia), CSA Holdings (Singapore), ECS Holdings (Singapore), First Logic Company (Thailand), Frontline Technologies (Singapore), Ingram Micro Asia (Singapore), PT Sun Microsystems Indonesia and Wipro Infotech (India).

"The next step for Sun will be establishing satellite centers and more partner-run authorized iForce Solution Centers around the region to complement this facility," said Lim.

Sun currently has three other Sun-run iForce Solution Centers worldwide, in California, Paris and Tokyo. There are also more than 75 solutions specific iForce Solution Centers worldwide; 50 partner-run Authorized iForce Solution Centers, and nine Competency Centers focused on application partners such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. More information on Sun"s iForce Centers is available at http://www.sun.com/executives/iforce/centers/.