Fox Sees Sun's Solaris

The Fox Television Stations Inc. network has tapped Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris 10 operating system (OS), servers, and storage to streamline its advertising traffic and management system, a company executive told TechWeb at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.

The News Corp.'s subsidiary has recently begun to deploy services and hardware from Sun to create a sales, traffic, and programming management system. Fox will use the system, in part, to cross-sell and keep tabs on advertising that runs on television, the Internet and other mediums.

Sun Fire E6900 and E4900 enterprise-class servers, Sun Fire x64 servers powered by AMD Opteron processors, the Sun StorEdge 6920s and the L500 tape libraries will support Pilat Media’s sales, traffic and program management software. Fox replaces IBM AS400 servers.

"Applications servers will run Pilat Media and database servers will run Oracle," said Katherine Parker, Sun's business development manager of Internet, Media & Entertainment Global Industry sales. "We're providing thin clients called Java stations, which are ideal for customer care environment because they don't have brains. They get the information from the network."

The news comes one day following Sun's chief executive officer Scott McNealy's resignation after failing to lessen losses at the company he founded about 24 years ago. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported that its third-quarter net loss widened to $217 million from $28 million in the year-ago quarter. Jonathan Schwartz will remain the company's president and step in as CEO.