Sun Microsystems announced that it has expanded its Campus Ambassador Program to 170 universities in 30 countries. The expansion greatly increases the program's ability to help improve student, research and faculty access to free training and tools for today's newest software technologies. This initiative is the latest in Sun's drive to provide academic developers with the educational tools and resources they need to cultivate important IT skills, participate in today's global economy, and contribute to the innovation of new technologies.

Through Sun's Campus Ambassador Program, more than 170 student evangelists will introduce Sun platforms to academic developers. These technologies and open source projects include the Solaris10 Operating System (OS), the most advanced OS on the planet; Java-based technologies; community projects such as the OpenSolaris project and OpenSPARC project; and the NetBeans integrated development environment and Sun Studio software tools.

Sun provides the ambassadors with free training and support so they have the proficiency to demonstrate these technologies throughout the academic year. Ambassadors will also help student developers take advantage of Sun's robust portfolio of high-value, no-cost resources, such as free Web-based training, free developer tools, open source technologies and communities, and easily accessible technical support via forums and communities.

"The next great technology innovation can come from anywhere," said Kim Jones, VP of Global Education, Government and Health Sciences for Sun Microsystems. "It's as likely to be invented by a student in China or India as one in London or Silicon Valley. Sun's goal is to empower academic developers through sharing, collaboration and open innovation—the key elements of what we at Sun refer to as the Participation Age. The Campus Ambassador Program lets students help each other gain hands-on experience with leading-edge, open source technologies. Not only will these students be prepared to compete in the global economy—they'll go on to create amazing new innovations, and we will all benefit."

By offering training and certification programs for the freely available open source Solaris 10 OS, Sun will empower academic developers to create powerful new applications. Because Solaris 10 is supported on over 700 x86/x64 platforms from popular vendors including HP, IBM and Dell, the training provides applicable real-world expertise. Through Sun’s Academic Initiative (SAI), a collaborative program between Sun and academic institutions, Solaris 10 developers can gain the skills they need to meet immediate business challenges and to gain industry-recognized credentials. As part of this program, non-profit institutions (not individuals) become authorized, enabling those institutions to deliver training on Sun technologies to their faculty, staff and students. In addition, Sun offers academic developers free access to selected online courses through the Sun Learning Center.

Both the Campus Ambassador Program and the NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition are part of the Sun Developer Network (SDN) Academic Developer Program. Launched in 2005, this program extends Sun's resources for the developer community to students, researchers and faculty around the world, and further solidifies Sun's commitment to educating student developers. The program aims to increase the access that students have to educational developer tools, thus helping them graduate with the skills they need to contribute to the advancement of technology.