It's amazing what happens when companies decide to work together instead of tear each other apart.The Sun Microsystems and Microsoft detente continues to bear surprising fruits, this time in the form of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond campus. It's actually an expansion of Sun's current presence in the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center where testing Microsoft software on Sun hardware is performed.

The center is designed to allow the two firms to work on optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems and storage and the availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 (more details here).

Among the objectives of the Interoperability Center are optimization of Microsoft applications on Sun x64 systems and storage and promotion of full interoperability in application areas such as virtualization, Java technology, systems management, and identity.

Additionally, the Center will collaborate with authorized Sun Solution Centers to support customers running their own deployments. They can bring their own scenarios to the center for testing by Sun and Microsoft engineers.

The companies are even working on tighter interoperability between Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation in Sun's Web services interoperability technologies.