Sun Engages Channel

Unveiled at the kickoff to its iForce partner road show last week, the move is part of Sun's overall plan to align existing sales and partner resources to ensure customers purchase products from every sector of Sun's portfolio, Sun's top U.S. sales executives told CRN last week.

VARs welcomed the changes, saying they open doors for them to sell more services into customer accounts that are owned by Sun's direct salespeople.

"Sun forces us to make big investments, and [in the past] we didn't recoup on those investments because the alignment and engagement wasn't there at the enterprise level," said David Auerweck, vice president of strategic markets for Helio Solutions, Santa Clara, Calif. "This gives us the opportunity to go in with the Sun team and sell our services to an account, whereas before we were held at arm's length."

Sun hopes the new model also will diversify the types of products sold by its partners and its sales team, said Rich Napolitano, president of U.S. sales for Sun. Currently many customers still tend to buy tried-and-true offerings that have traditionally comprised the bulk of Sun's revenue.

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Sun introduced the changes at the first stop on its Grow America Tour at its Santa Clara headquarters. The tour replaces Sun's iForce Partner Summit, which had been held annually since 1986.

The road show, which hits Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago next week, also gives partners their first chance to meet Sun's new U.S. sales management team—Napolitano and Tim Lieto, senior vice president of U.S. sales. Both were appointed in January.

Though Sun canceled its partner summit, the vendor did hold its VAR Council meeting as scheduled in April. There Sun presented a Gartner report that assessed its partner strategy, showing which aspects are working and which ones could use some tweaking, said Greg Stroud, vice president of U.S. alliances at Sun.

One partner who attended the VAR Council meeting said the overall assessment was that Sun's program was "extremely dysfunctional" in contrast to programs from competitors such as IBM and Microsoft.

Stroud said the report pointed to flaws in Sun's field-sales engagement, demand generation and marketing for partners—areas that the new channel changes should address.