SUN ANNOUNCES AVAILABILITY OF SOLARIS OPENSTEP AND WORKSHOP OPENSTEP BETA

Meets Customer Demand For Operating System and Object-based Development Environment

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA. July 22, 1996 - SunSoft, Inc., the Internet software company, announced today that it has delivered the beta release of its SolarisTM OpenStepTM operating environment and WorkShopTM OpenStep development environment products. These products are Solaris implementations of the open, portable object standard specification jointly created by SunSoft and NeXT Software, Inc.

"Solaris OpenStep and WorkShop OpenStep are a marriage of two very promising things," says Alex B. Cone, first vice president of the Development Services Organization at Lehman Brothers in New York. "It provides a fabulous development environment on top of a widely-used operating system." Any application written for Solaris OpenStep can be deployed on OpenStep for other platforms, he notes, and developing in the Solaris OpenStep environment allows the user to easily support a large variety of corporate networks.

"Solaris OpenStep provides developers a mature, robust, field-tested environment for serious object-based application development," explains Steve MacKay, vice president and general manager of Solaris products. "Any application written using OpenStep is a full citizen in the Sun environment. That means you can simultaneously run today's 10,000 available Solaris applications, OpenStep applications, and Java applications on the same machine."

The SunSoft OpenStep product line includes the Solaris OpenStep operating environment and the WorkShop OpenStep development environment. Solaris OpenStep applications co-exist with applications running in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment (CDE), JavaTM programming language, OpenWindowsTM user environment, WabiTM API translation software and the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE). Underlying these products is Solaris, the most scalable, reliable and secure enterprise and Internet/intranet operating environment for SPARC and Intel platforms. WorkShop OpenStep is unparalleled for offering the most comprehensive, graphical programmer productivity tools for "snapping together" new applications from pre-built components.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. expanded its product offering to the object community through its recent acquisition of Lighthouse Design, Inc., the largest and most successful independent systems vendor in the OpenStep market.

"The OpenStep initiative is now a reality," said Mitch Mandich, vice president of worldwide sales, NeXT Software. "We are pleased to have SunSoft embrace our applications development technology for the Enterprise and the Internet. By completing the joint initiative, we are making OpenStep available to the mainstream, object-oriented application development market."

The OpenStep specification is based on NeXT's object-oriented application layer found in NEXTSTEP. The Solaris OpenStep and WorkShop OpenStep products for SPARC are scheduled to ship in late Q3 of 1996. In order to offer customers complete freedom in selecting client/desktop environments, the SunSoft OpenStep product line will be delivered separately from the Solaris NEOTM object product offering. OpenStep is compatible with the currently shipping NEO products, available separately, for those customers who wish to use both Solaris OpenStep and NEO.

SunSoft, Inc.

SunSoft, Inc. is the leading provider of Internet management, access, application development and platform software. SunSoft's products, designed for information technology professionals, systems integrators value added resellers, and computer manufacturers, are used to deliver Internet, network, and desktop computing systems that improve a company's internal and customer communications, and lets them quickly adapt to business change. The products are licensed and distributed through computer manufacturers and resellers worldwide. SunSoft is a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc. For more information, contact SunSoft on the Internet at: _http://www.sun.com/sunsoft/_.