New day dawning for Sun.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: COTE'S colorado

Kristin Russell couldn't be a better cheerleader for Sun Microsystems. The vice president of IT operations at the company's Broomfield campus evokes the kind of evangelist aura that only comes from a true believer.

That's because she never lost her faith.

Five years ago, few would have bet on Sun surviving as an independent entity. Hammered by the 2001 dot-com meltdown, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company quickly saw itself outgunned as prices dropped in its server and workstations niche, and an endless parade of startups that used its services disappeared while bigger clients scaled back.

Doom-heavy headlines like "Setting Sun" topped news stories that were essentially premature obituaries. It was just a matter of time before the company imploded, the experts agreed.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of Sun's death were an exaggeration--because the company refused to give up.

"We really have come back, and I think it comes from perseverance," says Russell, who was one of the first employees Sun hired at its Interlocken campus in 1998. "It's all about setting realistic goals, being operationally mature about how we're going to achieve those goals and having a vision and a strategy and really executing on that."

Sun landed on Fortune magazine's 2008 "Most Admired Companies" list in March, ranked No. 5 in the computer category behind Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Apple. In January, the company reported that its quarterly profit had doubled over the same quarter a year ago, to $260 million.

When it arrived in Colorado 10 years ago, Sun quickly became one of the biggest private-sector employers in the Broomfield/Boulder area, rivaled only by IBM, StorageTek, Ball Corp., and Interlocken neighbor Level 3 Communications. It currently employs 4,369 workers in the area.

Now, in the wake of Sun's strategy to increase its reach by acquiring data storage company StorageTek for $4.1 billion in 2005, the company can be credited for helping to snag a major employer to the U.S. 36 corridor through its $58.5 million sale of the former StorageTek campus in Louisville to ConocoPhillips.

The energy giant is slated to bring thousands of jobs'to the region and is primed to become a catalyst for innovation with the state's research universities and government laboratories. (Jeff Rundles explores the deal on...