SANTA CLARA, CA – 1 April 2008

Sun Microsystems, Inc (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the acquisition of the privately held OpenNMS Group for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. This represents Sun’s return to its roots as a leader in network management solutions. Coupled with the excellent performance of the Java-based application on Sun hardware, this should provide a compelling story for those companies looking for a high performance, yet affordable, management solutions.

“With its amazing download numbers and adoption by numerous and prestigious companies, acquiring the company behind OpenNMS was a no brainer,” said Frodo Baggins, special adjunct undersecretary in charge of tofu for Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems.

“I’m not sure what happened,” said Tarus Balog, CEO, Poobah Emeritus, Knight Exemplar and Wild and Crazy Guy for the OpenNMS Group. “I’m partial to these Wyler’s Italian Ices, and some guys came in with a truckload of ’em. A few hours later I awoke from my sugar coma with a signed contract in one hand and a bagful of money in the other. It was a nice, large bag.”

This move confirms Sun’s commitment to its open source direction by investing in those technologies demanded by today’s extreme growth, as well as traditional, enterprises. With the ability of OpenNMS to scale to hundreds of thousands of interfaces it compliments the rest of the Sun open source portfolio. The OpenNMS Project should see a heightened amount of financial investment as well as more and better beer at Dev-Jam.

[UPDATE: Apparently, Sun has acquired Hyperic that has acquired OpenNMS. Go figure.]