Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company selling computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. The company was headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
On January 27, 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009. Sun Microsystems, Inc. was subsequently renamed Oracle America, Inc.
Sun products included computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC processors as well as AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors; storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Other technologies of note include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, and a major contributor to open source software. Sun's main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.
Sun acquisitions
1987 - Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware company
1987 - Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
1988 - Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format
1991 - INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company
1992 - Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi
1994 - Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
1996 - Lighthouse Design, Ltd.
1996 - Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics
1996 - Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
1996 - Thinking Machines Corporation software division
February 1997 - LongView Technologies, LLC
August 1997 - Diba, a technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry
September 1997 - Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOS
November 1997 - Encore Computer Corporation's storage business
1998 - RedCape Software
1998 - i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—most notable product of this acquisition was the later use of its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
July 1998 - NetDynamics[35] - developers of the NetDynamics Application Server
1999 - German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org
1999 - MAXSTRAT Corporation, a network storage company located in Milpitas, CA specializing in Fibre Channel storage servers.
1999 - Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GL and TeamWare.
1999 - NetBeans, a newly formed business producing a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague.
March 2000 - Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory Services.
July 2000 - Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of large computing jobs across multiple computers
September 2000 - Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer
December 2000 - HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions support wide range of storage technologies and applications
2001 - LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System(SAM-FS) and Quick File System QFS high performance file systems for backup and archive
March 2002 - Clustra Systems
June 2002 - Afara Websystems, a company that develops next-generation SPARC processor-based technology
September 2002 - Pirus Networks, specializing in intelligent storage services
November 2002 - Terraspring, a pioneer in infrastructure automation software
June 2003 - Pixo, adds to the capabilities of the Sun Content Delivery Server
August 2003 - CenterRun, Inc.
December 2003 - Waveset Technologies, an identity management solutions company
January 2004 - Nauticus Networks
February 2004 - Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based 64-bit servers
January 2005 - SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider
May 2005 - Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000
June 2005 - SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software company for $387m
June 2005 - Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
August 2005 - StorageTek
February 2006 - Aduva, producer of software for Solaris and Linux patch management
October 2006 - Neogent
April 2007 - SavaJe, developer of the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
September 2007 - Cluster File Systems, Inc.
November 2007 - Vaau, provider of Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
February 2008 - MySQL AB, the company offering the popular open source database MySQL
February 2008 - Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product
April 2008 - Montalvo Systems, failed x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
January 2009 - Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions