Sun Promises to Shine on New Markets

Speaking here at the vendor's annual iForce partner conference, Sun executives say they are close to rolling out plans that will amount to some of the biggest new channel initiatives in years. While providing no exact timetable on when they will outline final plans, these same officials say they are close. Says Cheryl Kelly, global director of Sun iForce community efforts, "We are beyond information gathering and at the proposal floating stage, getting feedback and fine-tuning our thinking. We should be finished in a few months."

From the highest levels, Sun executives believe these fields provide a significant new opportunity for Sun. Masood Jabbar, executive vice president of Sun's global sales operations, characterized the unmet opportunity in the SMB space alone to be a whopping $228 billion. Describing the North American the market as "the single largest GDP in the planet," Jabbar conceded Sun has "not done a good job going after it."

New programs coming from Sun, he said, will change that. But what exactly the scope of those programs are is not yet clear, however.

Some in the Sun community believe Sun's goals will be best accomplished by relying on Sun's existing partners, which include two channel development partners in GEAccess and MOCA, and 500 or so indirect IT consultants, VARs and solution providers who buy from these companies, among others. Others in the Sun camp, however, favor enlisting new allies that already target not only the SMB space but other, vertical fields that Sun now wants to target.

Sun's top executive at the event, president and COO Ed Zander, told VARBusiness in an exclusive interview at the partner conference that the company has no intention of deviating from its traditional go-to-market strategy, adding that Sun has no plans to put sales reps in the field to call on small and midsize customers, for example. But he acknowledged his lieutenants have a difficult task of deciding what is the best go-to-market strategy within the confines of their current channel structure. For now, he's deferring decisions to Jabbar and Sun's front-line channel manager, Gary Grimes, vice president of partner management and sales operations at Sun. Zander does believe that Sun can be a sizable player in the SMB space, especially in outsourcing and hosting, because, as Zander put it, "SMB companies are the first ones that don't want to be in the IT business and want to outsource these capabilities instead."

Jabbar told partners that he'd like to reduce Sun's dependency on its top three vertical markets: telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing. Today, approximately 60 percent of Sun's sales in vertical markets are done with customers in just these three areas. By 2004, Jabbar hopes success in energy, government, life sciences, retail, health care and other fields will lower that number to less than 50 percent.