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Sun Eyes Wall Street In Bid To Regain Share: Page 2 of 2

Sun "laid out a strategy that was clear and concise," says Bill Morgan, CIO at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which runs its trading-floor systems on Sun technology. An electronic options-trading system that's being rolled out, PHX XL, is based on Sun's new Solaris 10. As momentum on Wall Street shifts from conventional floor-based trading to electronic trading, the Philadelphia exchange remains committed to Sun because Solaris 10 promises to deliver the performance required to handle greater electronic volumes, Morgan says.

With the rollout of the options system, the exchange expects the number of electronic messages generated from other exchanges to double to 120,000 per second next year, and the number of electronic messages generated from its own floor to jump from 4,000 per second to 30,000 per second next year.

"Sun had fairly loyal customers in the financial-services community that have moved at least part of their operations to Linux and x86 because running on those platforms was cheaper," says Gordon Haff, an analyst with research firm Illuminata. "Solaris on x86 gives Sun quite a firm entree back in." But Haff is skeptical about how big an impact opening up Solaris will have on software developers. "Sun used to be the most popular Unix development platform, and it has really been upstaged by Linux in particular and open source in general," he says.

Sun's new version 10 of Solaris includes features meant to set it apart from Linux and Microsoft Windows, the operating systems of choice on x86 hardware.