Sun, Hyperion Dress Up Solaris For SOX

The two vendors announced their global agreement on Tuesday. The software, which will run on Sparc Unix and x86 platforms, will further Hyperion's push into what it calls business performance management. An emerging market, this form of BPM melds business intelligence tools, transactional data and financial management capabilities so that businesses can continually adjust their operations to meet corporate and financial goals. The new agreement now brings those capabilities to companies that run Solaris.

Under terms of the agreement, Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., and Hyperion, Sunnyvale, Calif., will develop and co-sell integrated software for the financial, telecommunications and retail industries as well as line-of-business operations such as marketing, sales and human resources. Those solutions will offer greater performance and increased scalability and levels of control necessitated by new compliance regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX, and International Financial Reporting Standards in Europe. Sections 302 and 404 of SOX mandate that U.S. public companies meet stringent reporting, auditing and quality control provisions.

The software will be deployed by Sun's partners and resellers and Hyperion's network of 600 solution providers. Hyperion is a developer of BPM software.

One Sun partner said the Sun-Hyperion solutions will pay off in a variety of ways. "The most prominent statement I hear from CIOs on a weekly basis relates to their ability to scale their organization to meet regulatory and compliance requirements while continuing to support primary business objectives," said Douglas Nassaur, president and CEO of True North Technology, a Sun partner in Alpharetta, Ga. "Based on Java, J2EE and services-oriented architecture, the solutions will solve other issues for the customer along the way."

One analyst said Sun-"like other vendors--is homing in on a key pain point in the marketplace.

"Regulatory compliance is an important issue to public companies in the United States. It is also a somewhat complex issue, one that many do not fully understand," said Dan Kusnetzky, a vice president at research firm IDC. "It appears that Sun has learned of this area of confusion in its customer base and is seeking ways to help."

Microsoft launched a Solution Accelerator for SOX in March that is based on Office.