Sun's Stroud Speaks

Grimes spoke about the benefits partners deliver to vendors, and how their value-add isn't always appreciated by those who don't recognize the importance of the channel. Grimes also noted that, while successful execs get the credit, it's the boots on the ground who make things happen.

That belief is also held by Grimes' successor, 22-year Sun veteran Greg Stroud, who intends to enlist more partners in the task of expanding Sun's presence in the channel. The time is ripe for the move, given that Sun appears to be riding a wave of newfound popularity with its line of servers based on AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor.

I spoke to Stroud in preparation for VARBusiness' upcoming midmarket issue. He told me the company has revamped its entire coverage model over the past few months, carving it up into distinct segments to address Fortune 500 accounts, the larger non-Fortune 500 accounts, enterprise accounts and smaller businesses. "There's a channel play in every single one of those," says Stroud, who is putting in place a major effort to recruit more Sun partners.

Sun's direct sales force will remain focused on the company's Fortune 500 customers, though it won't restrict its partners from that arena. However, in the other segments, Sun is completely dependent on its resellers. "We are pretty happy with the channel we have in place, and I don't believe we have to go out and aggressively get new players that are going to go out and compete with our installed base," he told me in a recent interview. "What I am interested in doing is finding players that have unique value propositions, because we have a whole new suite of products that are causing a stir in the marketplace."

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Specifically, Sun is looking for partners that can help it expand beyond its traditional strength in the financial arena to address a host of new vertical segments. "We're working to scope out the investments we need to make to open up incremental markets," Stroud says. "We believe we're going to focus into retail consumer-packaged goods, health care and manufacturing."

Along with addressing new categories of end users, Sun is consolidating its channel programs. "Over the last 18 months, we've taken all of the different partner programs that were aligned by [the] business unit," Stroud says. "We used to have [separate] software, hardware and services reseller channels. We unified all those under one single channel program."

"We now have a single organization focused on the entire partner ecosystem," Stroud continues. "We believe we're going to get a tremendous amount of value from programs like iForce Connect, where we marry our ISV partners up with our traditional distribution channel."

While continuing to rely on its strength among larger corporate customers, Stroud will work to extend Sun's reach downward. "The addressable mid-market for Sun is huge, because our penetration is not as large as they are in the larger markets," he says. That penetration could be boosted if sales of Sun's Opteron boxes continue to grow at the 40 percent unit-volume clip they demonstrated last quarter. Sun's unit volume overall showed a growth of roughly 20 percent across all product families, demonstrating that the company may finally be out of its long-term doldrums.

"We're going out and getting aggressive alliances together," Stroud promises. "We are totally dependent on our partner play to work our enterprise tier and the midmarket. And we're totally dependent on our partners to bring solutions to bear."