Sun Sees Midtier As Fertile Ground

Sun's 41 Storage Elite partners, on average, doubled their storage revenue on a year-over-year basis, and "many have seen their revenue more than double," said James Staten, director of marketing for Sun's storage business.

Staten also said the vendor would focus its storage research and development spending on the midmarket as part of its strategy. "The higher end of the market is a saturated market," he said. "What we see here are vendors taking share away from each other."

He cited "flat margins" in the low end of the storage market as another reason to concentrate on the midtier.

Staten spoke at the two-day RBC Capital Markets System Area Network Conference held here. In delivering a bullish view of Sun's storage business, Staten said Sun's intention is to grow its share of the $11 billion Unix storage space faster than the rest of the market. Research firm IDC predicts that segment will grow to a $14 billion market by 2006.

Staten and Richard Napolitano, a Sun storage vice president who also addressed conference attendees, pointed to Sun's continued refocusing and retrenchment. As part of those efforts, Sun has decided to maintain its storage business as "strategic" to the company, he said.

In addition, Sun last year bought Pirus Networks, a data services company, and revamped its storage channel program to target higher-performing solution provider partners.

Napolitano, who will head up the Sun data services unit formed out of the Pirus acquisition, said the first Sun products developed in the wake of the merger are on track for a rollout this quarter. The products will be aimed at providing "any kind of access to any kind of storage" on any kind of platform,from Ethernet to T3, he said.

The data services offering will be a key part of Sun's newly articulated N1 "virtualization" rollout, he said.

One Sun solution provider who requested anonymity said Sun's relationship with Hitachi Data Systems,which builds Sun StorEdge 99xx solutions under the Sun brand,was a key reason for the vendor's growth in storage sales. "The HDS relationship is the single biggest thing that drove Sun's storage numbers in 2002," said the solution provider.