Sun Microsystems and Joyent Announce Social Application Program to Offer Free Web Hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial Developers

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) and Joyent Inc. today announced a collaboration that will accelerate the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. Providing up to 12 months free web hosting on Joyent's Cloud, a flexible first-class infrastructure powered by OpenSolaris™ on Sun’s ultra-scalable servers, as well as training on web-scale application development, the program lets developers deploy their social applications on an entirely open infrastructure at no initial cost. "We appreciate what Sun and Joyent are doing to accelerate development of OpenSocial,” said Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5. "Our developers look forward to developing and deploying on Joyent Accelerators that provide a reference architecture that has proven to be successful across other platforms.” "Bumpersticker started on a Joyent Accelerator as an experimental Facebook application 11 months ago. Bumpersticker has now grown to over one billion page views a month,” said Jason Hoffman, Founder and CTO of Joyent. "Sun’s OpenSolaris has helped Joyent meet our clients' needs to scale quickly. The open-sourcing of Solaris has made a big difference to our business model. It allows us to scale virtually and keep up with the rapid growth in demand for Joyent's Cloud computing service.” Social applications are the cornerstone of social networking web sites. Recommendation-based growth can mean widespread and very rapid distribution so applications must be architected and built for a large user base. Developers using the new service from Sun and Joyent will now have this flexibility and scalability via access to the Sun-powered, OpenSolaris-based Sun Fire™ x4150 and Sun Fire x4500 Joyent Cloud. Cloud computing allows developers to start with a small set of resources capable of serving thousands of users and provision additional resources on-demand to scale to millions of users as required. "We have been using Joyent's Cloud for eight months. Joyent and the OpenSolaris-based infrastructure they provide has helped us reliably scale to over four million users and over 22 million widget views a day at an extremely low cost," said Mark Otero, Founder and CEO of Klicknation.com. "Developers of Glam applications need more than a good idea. To succeed, you need to start small on a flexible platform that can rapidly scale from a few hundred users to several million users," said Adam Souzis, architect of the Glam Application Platform. "That's why Glam has chosen to partner with Joyent to offer infrastructure to developers building applications on Glam's OpenSocial-based platform." "Social applications are one of the fastest growing software categories and will continue momentum with the promise of monetization offered by Hi5, Facebook, Myspace, Google’s Orkut, LinkedIn Glam and other social networking sites with memberships that number in the millions,” said Juan Carlos Soto, VP of Global Market Development and Engineering of Sun Microsystems. "With this new program, Sun can provide social application developers access to Sun's technology and expertise in building large-scale applications with Joyent helping them to deploy on a highly scalable and reliable platform.” Multi-city Tour For Developers In conjunction with this offering, Sun and Joyent are organizing a multi-city Social App Tour to offer training on developing web-scale social applications on the Cloud. The tour will travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston, New York and Austin/Dallas between September and December. Training will cover architecting and designing social applications that are capable of scaling to deal with viral growth and will demonstrate how to use tools such as Dtrace to identify infrastructure bottlenecks and optimize code for maximum scalability. For more information about the social application tour and free hosting offer, visit http://www.joyent.com/a/socialdev and www.sun.com/startup/social. For information on the Sun Startup Essentials program, visit http://www.sun.com/startups. About Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com. About Joyent Inc Joyent provides Cloud computing services. Joyent's goal is to help developers go from idea to millions of customers served without the pain of large capital outlays and long-term vendor contracts. Our clients use Joyent Accelerators to power large scale web applications, including apps for Facebook and OpenSocial. Joyent Accelerators are virtualized servers coupled with the highest grade network and routing fabric available. Joyent's cloud is open, scalable, and fast. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, OpenSolaris, and Sun Fire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.