Sun Cancels iForce Partner Summit

Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., still plans to hold its VAR Advisory Council meeting in Orlando, Fla., as scheduled in April, but there will be no accompanying national channel summit, as is usually the case, said Bill Cate, director of the U.S. iForce partner office.

Though sources hinted that Sun was canceling the show to save money, Cate said that is not among the reasons for the change.

"The cost of doing a 10-city road show vs. a big event in Orlando -- I'm not sure if there's money saved or not," he said. "I think this will be a very resource- and time-intensive effort for Sun, but that's OK if it allows our partners to be more efficient in Q4 to sell."

Cate said there are two main reasons Sun is changing the format of its partner conference. The first is due to feedback from partners, who find that attending various vendor partner conferences take a lot of time out of their schedules. That time could be spent drumming up business, he said.

"All of the vendors are killing the partners with multi-day events," Cate said. "You add those up and the partner out-of-the-office time is pretty significant."

Another reason Sun has canceled the annual conference is because the company recently reorganized its sales organization and appointed a new U.S. sales management team, and wanted to give the new executives a more intimate setting in which to make their first formal pitch to partners, Cate said.

In mid-January, Sun appointed Rich Napolitano president of Sun's U.S. geographically established market (GEM), and Tim Lieto vice president of U.S. customer sales. Napolitano replaced Sun veteran Bill Cook, previously U.S. vice president of sales.

Tom Kuni, president of SSI hubcity, a VAR in Metuchen, N.J., called it "smart" of Sun to introduce the new sales management team to smaller groups of partners through regional events rather than put them before the entire partner community at a summit.

"It's unfair to the new guys put in place to deliver a message when they have just come on board," Kuni said. "[Sun] wanted some time to get their act together [and let] the new management team get familiar with the troops in the field."

Napolitano and Lieto, along with Greg Stroud, vice president of iForce partner sales, will all host one-day events at each stop on the road show, which will kick off in San Francisco in May. The tour, which will take place through May and possibly into June, also will hit Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Boston, Cate said.

The format of the individual city events will be consistent and will comprise a morning general session in which the executives will lay out their strategy and engage in a dialogue with partners, Cate said. An afternoon session will consist of new program announcements followed by a series of workshops that "may target different subsets of the partner community," he said.

Cate said it remains to be seen whether Sun will permanently cancel its annual partner summit, first held in 1986, in favor of the road show format.

"We're going to see how this goes," Cate said. "Like everything we do, we'll circle back to partners [after the roadshow] and say, 'Hey, did that work?'"