JPMC has been conducting pilots with Sun over the last year in New York, London and Hong Kong, testing a variety of Sun products. The pilots include utility computing, provisioning and a trading data archive for use by JPMC and its clients.

“We are pleased to be working closely with Sun in implementing their newest technologies,” says Adrian Kunzle, vice president and global co-head of investment bank technology architecture.

JPMC has been a Sun customer for over 20 years.

“The financial services industry is one of the most demanding on earth. Performance, reliability and security are not only business imperatives, but competitive differentiators," says Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun.

Sun and JPMC are now involved in co-development activities that include work on data archiving and virtualized data center solutions. Sun will also join JPMC's existing grid computing initiative.

The news is a boost for Sun, which has been under pressure to compete in an industry that has seen tightening budgets and the rise of Linux and Intel platforms in recent years. The source code for Solaris 10 was released to the developer community this year in a blaze of publicity.