Meet Sun's New Channel Chief

The elevation of a telco specialist to the top channel position at Sun has VARs questioning the vendor's commitment to partners under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz's regime.

Despite a strong new lineup of storage and server products and a new storage distribution deal, the reseller community is looking warily at Sun's naming of Tom Wagner to the top channel executive job, replacing 24-year veteran Greg Stroud. Beyond wondering whether Wagner is right for the position, partners are questioning the overall health of the vendor's beleaguered channel programs.

"Hopefully, the pendulum won't swing too far toward the direct business," says David Auerweck, vice president of sales at Helios Solutions, a Sun partner based in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Stroud's departure is just one of the executive moves of interest to the channel since Schwartz took over for Sun's longtime CEO Scott McNealy. Rich Napolitano, president of its USA GEM (Geographically Established Market) unit was replaced by Tim Lieto, while Cheryl Cook was appointed to fill Lieto's role as vice president of U.S. sales.

But Wagner, in his first interview since landing the position of vice president of partner sales, said his telco experience will serve him well at Sun and that resellers can rest easy knowing most programs will remain intact with no shift toward direct sales.

"I don't see any substantive shift there at all," Wagner tells VARBusiness. "The one thing we are seeing is a continued focus on our field sales efforts, so you are going to see a very robust Sun sales force continue to beat the street, so to speak."

Wagner, who first worked at Sun from 1994 to 1998, rejoined the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company in 2002 to head up its communications business, overseeing relationships with key customers in the telecommunications industry, including Verizon, Cingular and Cisco.

He sees his direct relationships with customers as an advantage, not a liability.

"I will tell you our coverage and sales strategy in those large accounts has been completely partner-centric," Wagner says. "The account plans we develop, which basically help us understand how we deliver true value into the enterprise, have a very strong partner component. Frankly, we don't deliver the highly differentiated value we believe we bring to the Verizons and Cingulars of the world in the absence of a clear, crisp, solid partner engagement and strategy. So I've come to know the partner community in a very large way."

That said, Wagner also has experience building a channel program, which he did as president of DSL provider Covad's Southeast region. "I literally built out Covad's business in BellSouth's and Southwestern Bell's [territory], and basically built the channel infrastructure," he says.

Now, as head of partner sales at Sun, Wagner will build on Stroud's plan to roll out the company's new Sun Partner Advantage (SPA) program during the next several months.

"We are going to work to maximize partner profitability to help them more effectively align with the key tenets of our key imperatives, which is mainly to make money and grow this business," he says.

SPA will provide more clarity about how partners will be compensated, says Bill Cate, director of Sun's U.S. partner programs.

"It will clearly delineate partners who invest in Sun," he says. "Not just servers, not just storage, not just services and software, but partners who do all of those combined."

The program will have three levels, but the big message is how it will provide clarity to partners, Cate adds.

Also worth noting about Wagner is his interest in managed services. As it turns out, Sun is readying a slew of managed services to be unveiled in October.

"I believe that a robust managed- services portfolio-delivery capability is really having a critical path to fundamentally changing the landscape or revenue line for the company," Wagner says.

Jeff Barteld, director of Sun's U.S. channel sales, says he believes the channel will receive Wagner with open arms, and that his background is well-suited to running partner sales.

"Tom is absolutely up to the task," Barteld says. "He has a great track record. He's a seasoned VP; we look forward to working with him."

Indeed, Helios' Auerweck says some of these changes may prove to be positive. "I would say Sun's due for some changes," he says. "Shaking up the upper management is probably a good thing. Hopefully, the new management team will have a fresh attitude and some fresh ideas on how to reinvent Sun."

One thing that should take priority, Auerweck says, is for Sun to become more proactive in offering Windows solutions running on its new hardware. While it does market that, he says it's not enough.

"They do have Windows and Red Hat Linux support, but they haven't made a big enough splash about it," he says. "Now that they are going after the midmarket, they need to make a bigger splash with Microsoft."

Partners are bullish on Sun's latest crop of servers, including the vendor's re-entry into the blade market with the Sun Blade Modular 8000 system, one of three Sun servers based on AMD's Opteron x64 processors. The other two are rack-based: the Sun Fire X4600 is a 4-way server that can scale to 16, and the Sun Fire 4500 is an integrated server and storage system that supports up to 24 terabytes.

These new servers are targeted at the channel, Sun's Cate says. "Those products are not only an important part of the U.S. channel; they are a sweet spot," he says.

Likewise, Sun is hoping its new Avnet relationship will advance its efforts in gaining share in the storage market.

The addition of the Sun storage line is an extension of sorts given that Avnet is into its eighth year as a StorageTek distributor. Sun acquired StorageTek about a year ago for $4.1 billion.

Sun's Barteld says the addition of the Sun line makes sense because it fills in gaps that existed in StorageTek's portfolio.

"The acquisition of StorageTek pretty clearly signaled our intent to grow our storage business aggressively," Barteld says. "Avnet has continued to grow its StorageTek business, so it's really just logical to extend and expand the relationship."

Jeff Bawol, senior vice president and general manager of Avnet Partner Solutions, Enterprise Software and Storage, says the agreement will give partners selling StorageTek products a much broader storage portfolio from Sun.

"It gives us the ability to reach into the Sun legacy storage products and incorporate those with the StorageTek products, and gives our partners a more complete solution," Bawol says.