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Sun to replace PCs at Nomura

Sun strikes an agreement with investment banking giant Nomura to replace over 1,000 PCs with Sun JavaStations.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Sun Microsystems (SUNW) said today that Nomura International will replace about 1,000 PCs with Sun's network computers.

Japan-based Nomura, one of the largest international investment banks in the world, will replace personal computers with 1,100 Sun JavaStations, according to Sun and Nomura.

The JavaStation network computer is a desktop computer with no hard drive, no slots for add-in cards, no floppy drive, and no CD-ROM drive. The basic configuration is a microSPARC II chip, up to 64MB of memory, networking capability, and a 14- or 17-inch color monitor.

The announcement comes after a restructuring of Nomura's computer that calls for the introduction of Java-based graphical interfaces to desktop computers.

Nomura plans to deploy the JavaStation network computers over the next two years. Solaris-based servers are also being deployed, the investment bank said. Sun servers will support computer-intensive applications, database engines, file distribution, and development work.

"JavaStations are cheaper to operate than PCs," said Geoff Doubleday, Managing Director of Nomura International's Information Systems Division in a written statement. "Also, by writing our applications in Java, we get huge portability benefits because the apps will run on any platform we choose," he added.