MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – March 15, 2006 – Azul Systems, Inc., the pioneer of the industry’s first network attachedprocessing solution, designed to deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service, today announced that it has filed for declaratory relief from the courts to protect the interests of the company in the face of unfounded allegations from Sun Microsystems. These allegations include claims of patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets that Azul believes are completely without merit.
Sun has repeatedly threatened the company with litigation unless Azul granted Sun part ownership of the company, and agreed to pay exorbitant up-front fees and continuing royalties on the sale of Azul products. Attempts to reach an agreement failed when Sun gave Azul an ultimatum: accept its final proposal or face litigation.
Azul Systems, a Java™ licensee in good standing and an outspoken industry advocate for many elements of Sun’s developer technologies, has, on repeated occasions, offered Sun the opportunity to freely verify the truth or falsity of its accusations via audits, technical disclosure, access to its confidential documents, and details of the company’s intellectual property portfolio and development practices. Sun’s unwillingness to engage in any fact-finding endeavor, combined with its ultimatum, illustrates clearly its competitively-motivated intent to use its larger size to distract and consume key Azul resources at a time when the company is gaining increasingly visible and broad customer, partner, and technology traction.
“The unfortunate irony here is that Sun, a company with deep roots in research and development that actively markets sharing and expanding the technology landscape, has seen fit to adopt an anti-competitive strategy that stifles key innovation around the Java platform simply because they didn’t invent it,” said Stephen DeWitt, president and chief executive officer of Azul Systems. “Sun seems to be in disbelief that a young, privately held company can independently create such industry-defining technology. Azul has been forced into this legal process as a last resort.”
The lawsuit has been filed in California.
About Azul Systems
Azul Systems, Inc. has pioneered the industry’s first network attached processing solution, designed to unbound compute resources for service oriented applications. Without any application level modifications, binary compatibility requirements or operating system dependencies, this fundamentally new approach eliminates the need to capacity plan at the application level and dramatically lowers the cost and complexity associated with the traditional delivery of computing resources. More information on Azul Systems can be found at https://www.azulsystems.com.
Legal Notices
Azul Systems and Azul are registered trademarks and the Azul arch logo is a trademark of Azul Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Java and all Java based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other marks are the property of their respective owners and are used here only for identification purposes.
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