Sun Wants To Get 'Buddy-Buddy' With Partners

Sun Professional Services is putting the finishing touches on a "buddy" program that will pair local practice managers with partners, said Larry Baker, director of partner programs for Sun Professional Services.

The Professional Services person will serve as "an executive sponsor for a partner," Baker said. "They will explain how to deal with Sun and Sun Professional Services and answer any questions," he said.

A pilot version of the program is now under way in the Southwest, a geographical area under Baker's purview.

Baker said Sun Professional Services is getting "good reviews" of the initial interaction between partners,which can be Sun resellers, Sun ONE or iForce solution providers,and Sun Professional Services executives.

He hopes to roll out the partner-matching program nationwide and perhaps internationally in the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

Baker also elaborated on a change in Sun's Authorized Delivery Program, which was launched in February and permitted iForce partners to get certified to market, private-label and sell services from Sun Professional Services.

In fiscal 2003, Sun Professional Services intends to charge partners a 5 percent usage fee for each engagement delivered with Sun Professional Services methodologies the partner licenses, Baker said.

"This year, there was no fee," he said. The fee, which will be levied on deals starting Jan. 1, 2003, will "allow us to keep the services up to speed."

Baker also explained that Sun Professional Services is weighing how the Authorized Sales and Referral Program (ASRP), also launched in February, might be applicable to Sun ONE partners and global systems integrators such as Accenture and Cap Gemini Ernst and Young.

Under ASRP, solution providers can resell SunTone Certified Services and be compensated for leads they feed to Sun Professional Services and for business they share.

"Some partners may have really strong server capabilities, but they may not have SAN [expertise," Baker said. "We would come in and help [with the storage implementation."

Partners had mixed feelings about Sun Professional Services and their work with the organization.

Tony Orlando, vice president of systems consulting and integration at Strategic Technologies, Cary, N.C., said he has helped build Strategic's relationship with Sun Professional Services since 1998.

"Over the last 24 months, we have started to see the benefits of the relationship," he said, adding that the alliance has "really accelerated" in the past 12 months. "We agree that [Sun and Strategic have two sets of resources. We are bringing them together to be better able to compete against IBM Global Services."

Orlando noted that as Sun steps into more of a reseller role by offering products from Brocade Communications Systems, Veritas Software and others, "it [creates a little competition. But I have good relationships with Sun mid- and senior-level management, and we are talking through that."

Not all partners echo Orlando's sentiments. Gary Gwin, partner and founder of Cafesoft, a San Diego-based solution provider that did some work with Sun Professional Services in the late 1990s, said he had pretty much abandoned the prospect of teaming with the organization.

"I don't know if it was the people we were dealing with or the organization as a whole," Gwin said. Sun Professional Services contacts "tended to be slow to respond, and at least the people we were dealing with were paranoid we were going to cut them out. The whole decision-making process was flawed."

Regarding the nascent buddy program, Gwin said that it could help promote better partner relationships, "to the degree that [Sun Professional Services puts in more resources and participates more instead of being a business processor for invoices," Baker insisted that the strategy is to "use our partners. We have VARs at the customer level in the general territory, but we also engage with them in named accounts."

Elizabeth Montalbano contributed to this story.