06/15 09:19 E*TRADE Teams With Sun Microsystems to Meet
Rising Demand for
SUNW.O><EGRP.O>
E*TRADE Teams With Sun Microsystems to Meet Rising Demand for On-Line
Investing Services On-Line Investing Leader Opens New Technology and Customer Service
Center Near
Atlanta Running on Systems From Sun
NEW YORK, June 15 /PRNewswire/ -- In another move to meet booming demand for on-line
investing services with the latest cutting-edge technology, E*TRADE Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:
EGRP) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced the opening of a major
E*TRADE technology and customer service center outside of Atlanta.
The center, situated in Alpharetta, Ga., will be one of E*TRADE's primary fault tolerant, fully
redundant hubs for serving more than 1 million investor accounts throughout the world.
"The opening of our new technology and service center was a significant endeavor for E*TRADE
and its key vendors, and it represents another critical step toward building an infrastructure
capable of handling the growth in on-line investing in mainstream America," said Debra
Chrapaty, president and chief operating officer of E*TRADE Technologies, the company's
technology division. "We are absolutely committed to enhancing our Stateless Architecture(TM)
and product-service mix to position E*TRADE for the new millennium."
Although on-line investing has grown exponentially the last several years, it is far from the
saturation point. Indeed, some leading industry analysts expect on-line investing to increase
nearly fourfold -- from 40 billion to 140 billion trades per year -- by 2002.
To better prepare for this, E*TRADE chose to work with a virtual "Who's Who" of network
computing leaders to build its new technology and service center. The backbone of the operation
includes more than 100 highly reliable and scalable Sun Enterprise(TM) 250, 450 and 6500
servers with the robust Solaris(TM) Operating Environment. E*TRADE is also using high
performance Sun StorEdge(TM) A5000 Fibre Channel Arrays as well as Sun StorEdge D1000
RAID systems. The computing hardware includes networking equipment from Cisco Systems
Corp. and utilizes database, Web and transaction processing applications from Oracle Corp., the
Sun-Netscape Alliance and BEA Systems, Inc.
"This is a highly advanced, multi-tiered architecture that's been specifically designed to take full
advantage of the outstanding scalability, reliability, flexibility and security offered by Sun's
Solaris Operating Environment," said Rob Hall, vice president, financial services, Sun
Microsystems. "By using network computing to put investment and market intelligence in the
hands of its customers, E*TRADE has turned this industry on its ear. It's great to see E*TRADE,
like many of our customers in online investing, turning to our platform as a conduit for this kind
of change." |
