Sun Microsystems announced two new developer programs as part of the Sun Developer Network Program (SDN). Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service is offered in conjunction with Sun Services and provides e-mail-based technical assistance for individual developers anywhere in the world. The Sun Community Champions Program is a new developer recognition program.

Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service is the first offering from Sun to provide individual developers with specialized advice for programming issues on a per-request basis with guaranteed response times, which can help shorten their development and deployment cycles. The service is available to all developers with a cost of $99 (USD) per request. Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service provides global, round-the-clock e-mail-based support on Sun software including: NetBeans, Sun Java Studio Creator, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, Sun Studio 11 and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE).

This new program complements the more than 200 developer discussion forums available through the SDN community by empowering developers to choose the resource that best meets their needs. Developers can either submit inquiries to one of the forum discussions and receive community support or they can contact the Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service and get quick turnaround from dedicated Sun engineers.

"OmegaCube has been looking at a Java technology/Solaris 10 Operating System approach to make our product PowerERP available under Sun platforms. We were facing development challenges when using Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and required some help to meet our tight development deadline. The Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service team responded with the solution very quickly and we completed our development module on schedule. The Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service is a good program and I will definitely recommend it to others," said Alok Aggawal, CEO Omegacube Technologies.

Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service is also a key feature of the recently announced Sun Developer Service Plans. This is a comprehensive packaged service offering that combines programming advice, training credits and product support to reduce time and risk for the entire application lifecycle from development through deployment.

With the addition of Sun Developer Expert Assistance Service, Sun's portfolio of Developer Services expands to include a broader range of help resources including expert assistance, product support, training and certification, to connect both individual and corporate developers with the right resources whenever they need them.