Sun pumps up overseas outsourcing plans

Network World - Sun Microsystems Inc. is scaling back its vaunted Silicon Valley engineering group and expanding its facilities around the world in a bid to save on costs.
The company said today that it would expand facilities in Bangalore, Beijing, Prague and St. Petersburg, Russia. Published reports said the company isn't pulling out of Santa Clara, Calif., but it won't be hiring much there for the time being.
The ability to quickly hire a large number of programmers in India and other low-cost locations justified the company's plan to consolidate its worldwide research staff in those places, Sun said.
The announcement follows another recent outsourcing move by the company: Sun said it is outsourcing its internal IT team to Computer Sciences Corp. in a contract worth $360 million. Such moves have enabled it to reduce staff to about 30,000 workers, down from about 43,000 four years ago.
At the same time, the company has looked to bolster it service offerings and recently finalized its acquisition of SevenSpace, an IT services company that will expand the server maker's managed services by providing expertise beyond Sun's hardware and Solaris operating system.
In the past, Sun's remote services have centered primarily on Solaris-based systems. By integrating the SevenSpace technology into its offerings, Sun now will be able to offer customers support for competing operating systems such as HP-UX, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux, Sun executives say.
SevenSpace provides remote system monitoring and management for applications including SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and Siebel; databases including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server; operating systems including Solaris, Windows and Linux; and network devices.