NEW YORK: One time Silicon Valley darling Sun Microsystems Inc and World's leading fund house Fidelity Investments have announced deep cuts in their work force in response to continuing downturn in the economy.

Sun Microsystems said it was eliminating 5000 to 6000 jobs or 15 to 16% of its global work force, while Fidelity, which had laid off 1300 workers on Wednesday, announced it plans to cut another 1700 jobs in first three months of the new year.

Fidelity would have thus eliminated 3000 jobs or 7% of its total 44000 work force.

Sun Microsystems, responding to the slowdown in the technology-related spending, said that it was undertaking a series of changes designed to align its cost model with the global economic climate and accelerate the introduction of compelling open source innovations.

As part of this effort, Sun said it is reducing its global workforce and reorganising its Software organisation into new business groups - Application Platform Software, Systems Platforms, and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms - with a focus on boosting open source momentum and growing new sectors of the market who view technology as a competitive weapon.

"Today, we have taken decisive actions to align Sun's business with global economic realities and accelerate our delivery of key open source platform innovations - from MySQL and Sun's latest Open Storage offerings," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems.

As part of the latest actions, Sun's Board of Directors has approved a restructuring plan aimed at reducing costs by approximately $ 700 to $ 800 million annually.