In an initiative borne out of Sun Microsystems' traditional stronghold in the financial-services market, Sun and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. on Thursday disclosed plans to cooperate on a range of technology projects. The two will work together on a variety of fronts that will utilize Sun's Solaris 10 operating system as a basis for advances in grid computing, data archiving, and virtualized data centers.

J.P. Morgan's investment-bank technology team will develop applications using Solaris 10 that will be specifically applicable to the financial-services market, said Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun, in a statement. The alliance with J.P. Morgan is "the tip of the iceberg of what is to come," which will advance Sun's position in the financial-services market, he said.

J.P. Morgan has been conducting utility computing, provisioning, and trading data archiving pilot programs with Sun over the past year, testing both the Solaris operating system and a variety of new Sun servers. The companies expect that new applications developed as a result of the alliance will utilize Solaris 10 on both Sparc and x86-based server systems.

J.P. Morgan has been a Sun customer for more than 20 years.