Sun Eyes Midmarket

Sun also expects to unveil a registration program for partners to log all customer deals, said Bill Cate, director of Sun's U.S. iForce program. The plan is designed to ensure that Sun can protect solution providers from competing with each other once an account has been secured, he said.

The new lease options mirror offerings IBM rolled out last fall to entice midsize businesses. Through the Sun ValuePlus program Business Accelerator Lease, solution providers can offer small and midsize companies a 24-month fair-market lease with low criteria for financing approval, said Cheryl Kelly, global director of iForce marketing at Sun. The lease terms are based on current financing rates offered through a third-party bank, Kelly said.

The other lease option, available through June 30, enables solution providers to offer customers terms of no money down and no payment until August on Sun Fire V880 and V1280 servers, Kelly said. The V880 and V1280 are midrange servers targeted at midmarket customers, she added.

Bob Joyce, president and CEO of Perfect Order, a Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based solution provider, said about 25 percent of his company's business is in the midmarket. However, he said it has been "challenging" for Sun partners to play in that market because most applications running on Sun hardware have been geared toward large enterprises.

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The new registration process is an extension of Sun's Target Account Rebate Program (TARP), which was rolled out last fall, Cate said. Starting next week, Sun plans to extend TARP through the Opportunity Registration Program.

Under the plan, iForce partners can register a new customer account or "dormant account," Cate said. Sun has yet to define criteria for dormant accounts, but they likely will be previous Sun accounts that haven't been active for several years, he said.

Once a partner registers an account, Sun will approve or deny the registration according to several factors such as whether another partner already has registered the account or a different solution provider also has investments there, Cate said. After an account has been successfully registered and the products have shipped, iForce partners receive a 10 percent rebate on the list price of all products sold into that account, he said.

Sun plans to expand the registration to include any potential customers,new Sun accounts or current customers,with which iForce partners are working, Cate said. That process is slated to occur about 45 days after the program's rollout, he said.

The Sun VAR Council had urged Sun to implement such a registration program, said Rob Mock, president and CEO of Dewpoint, a Detroit-based solution provider. The program is a particularly huge win for iForce partners that resell hardware as well as provide services because it will protect a services partner from being undercut by a Sun reseller offering a lower price, he said.

"In the past, some partners just called in purchasing, and we got left out in the cold," Mock said.

Also at iForce, Sun plans to introduce the Competitive Knockout Program, which awards solution providers a 10 percent rebate for replacing a competitor's platform with Sun hardware during the vendor's fiscal fourth quarter, which ends June 30, Cate said. Partners can begin pursuing such deals this week, but the hardware must ship by that date for rebate eligibility, he added.