Sun Eyes Expansion in Africa

Sun Microsystems will focus special attention on Africa under a new emerging markets sales geography, which the company expects to drive accelerated expansion and sales coverage across growing markets.

Given the unique challenges faced in Africa, Sun will use the knowledge it has gained in North America and Europe to deliver ecologically sound and economically viable tools, said Hein Van Der Merwe, Sun's chief technologist for the Middle East and Africa region.

"The emerging markets sales geography is aimed at opening more opportunities for the governments, businesses and developers in regions like Africa," he said.

Sun has developed eco-friendly servers that use less power than a 100 watt light power, which consolidates workload on the network and reduces the carbon footprint used to run the infrastructure, Van Der Merwe said.

For a market faced with erratic power, he cites the Sunray desktop, which uses one-twentieth the power of a normal computer. Because no data is stored on the actual machine, one can work from any computer running the same application.

The company will also offer virtualization in order to save power and push systems to maximum operating capacity. Instead of having 20 servers, for example, a company can invest in 4 servers that utilize more of the infrastructure with less electricity.

"In Africa, the mobile phone providers are the fastest growing. Just like other infrastructure providers they are having problems with space and power," Van Der Merwe said. "With virtualization, the company can tackle the challenges of space and power."