Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have furthered their alliance with the building of a new centre designed to test the interoperability of their products and solutions, and the release of Sun Infrastructure Solution for Exchange Server 2007.

The interoperability Centre will be used to demonstrate and test the running of Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems and storage kit, with the aim of improving interoperability in areas including virtualisation, Java, systems management and identity.

Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing at Microsoft, said, "The center will provide a setting for hands-on testing and tuning of Sun/Microsoft solutions and help our joint customers achieve unprecedented performance results for their standardized and home-grown solutions. It is consistent with our recently announced interoperability principles… to enhance interoperability in the marketplace for the benefit of customers."

“The new Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center will help provide our joint customers with a testbed for running key Microsoft applications on Sun's x64 servers and help ensure more seamless integration between the technologies," added Lisa Sieker, vice president of Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems.