Sun Microsystems has announced its Sun Cloud Strategic Planning Service, a new portfolio of professional services designed to help drive new efficiencies for businesses of all sizes with quickly emerging cloud computing models. With more than 25 years of datacenter innovation and leadership, Sun Professional Services consultants can help customers achieve new levels of performance and better economics from desktop to datacenter. Sun is now applying this rich repository of expertise and intellectual property to help its clients evaluate, plan and implement advanced cloud strategies. For more information about Sun's Cloud Strategic Planning Service and other Sun Professional Services, go to www.sun.com/service/cloud.

Sun's comprehensive product portfolio and extensive Professional Services offerings provide the expertise to assess, architect and implement state-of-the-art, efficient datacenters. With this new Cloud Strategic Planning Service, Sun can help clients evaluate cloud computing solutions – both public and private – that can result in significant cost savings and flexibility. The Sun Cloud Strategic Planning Service will evaluate customer cloud readiness and opportunities in four key areas: Business, Organization/Culture, Technology and IT Environments, allowing Sun Professional Services experts to deliver a set of recommendations and associated plans for a solution that meets an organizations' business and IT objectives.

“Cloud Computing has been billed by the industry as the answer to today's IT woes, without much clarity on how to get there,” said Amy O'Connor, vice president, Services Marketing at Sun. “At Sun, we are applying our industry specific consulting and technology expertise to offer secure, practical guidance to companies looking to drive new levels of efficiency by leveraging this emerging computing model.”

Sun's new Cloud Strategic Planning Service helps clients address:

• Decreasing overall IT and/or facilities costs;
• Upgrading, migrating, consolidating or building a more agile datacenter or private clouds to support mergers and acquisitions, consolidation or divestiture activity;
• Accelerating IT resource deployment in the cloud;
• Improving IT alignment to support key business drivers;
• Becoming more cost effective at managing peak workload requirements in a cloud environment;
• Increasing IT flexibility, capacity and capability through a cloud computing model;
• Shifting users or key applications or facilities-related assets and management to a cloud computing vendor.