Making Things Simpler

As our cover story by CRN Senior Editor Elizabeth Montalbano and Industry Editor Craig Zarley explores, Sun is pulling the programs for its hardware and software products under one umbrella, with the intention of helping solution providers represent its entire infrastructure proposition. The move mirrors similar evolutions under way at Hewlett-Packard, a fact that Sun channel executives referenced more than once during a series of interviews with CRN editors.

Robert Youngjohns, executive vice president of global sales at Sun, says the overhaul should help Sun VARs and systems integrators think beyond closing individual transactions and focus on engaging for longer project life cycles. "Our intention is to build a completely different infrastructure for selling," he said.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's new president and COO, makes no secret that the $1.6 billion wad of money from Sun's kiss-and-make-up pact with Microsoft will be used, in part, to convince solution providers that it's a sound business idea to represent Sun technology. "We're a company with $7.5 billion in cash," Schwartz said. "We ought to leverage our balance sheet more on behalf of our partners."

Just how Schwartz plans to do so, he ain't saying yet. But something seems to be working: Sun's vice president of partner management and sales, Gary Grimes, said the vendor has recently lured 150 previously non-Sun partners into the fold through its relationship with Tech Data. Sun could also find traction through its decision to collapse certification requirements into two basic levels, Foundation and Premier, and through its decision to let partners test out of mandatory coursework based on real-world experience. CRN's annual certification research routinely points to unwieldy certification programs as a major hindrance to solution providers hoping to take on new vendors.

Certainly, Sun is making the right moves to re-engage with its traditional channel as well as with new partners that could help it at the volume level. But it will take the better part of this year to determine if these partners can put Sun back on the right track.

Will Sun rise again? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, welcomes your feedback at [email protected].