By Nick Patience
Sun Microsystems Inc’s SunTone initiative, which was launched yesterday at a heavy-duty event in New York, is in recognition of a fundamental shift in industry channels for delivering software and services says the company. Sun is of the opinion that software is just another add-on service to be outsourced and rented, not purchased. Sun chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy predicts the day will arrive shortly when all software comes from service providers where you’re only allowed to use it; you’re not allowed to purchase it, he says.
Its ServiceProvider.com initiative is a set of products and services, including starter kits, pre-configured systems, training, competency centers, rapid response teams, flexible leasing programs and preferred systems integrators that the company has been preparing for about a year to give it a larger slice of the ISP, ASP and any other-SP marketplace. The program is available in the US now and the rest of the world from July 1. Sun president and chief operating officer Ed Zander says he wants to make SunTone as familiar as the Intel Inside campaign.
SunTone certification and branding, which we detailed in yesterday’s story, will be gained by internet, application and others types of service providers that meet application, service and architecture parameters set by Sun, which will obviously include using Sun equipment and software to some degree, but not exclusively, says the company. The draft specifications, outlining the methodologies will be available in a draft form by July 1.
Sun says it has retrained its sales people worldwide and sales and executive compensation schemes have been altered at the company to provide bonuses based on how successful the service providers are in serving their customers. McNealy describes it as a coin-operated sales and management team. When asked a question about if this signaled a fundamental shift in Sun’s channel, and how significant would it be for its business in the future, McNealy’s one-word answers were yes and very. McNealy differentiated Sun’s approach from that of IBM Corp and Hewlett- Packard Co. He said that they are both trying to be in the service provider business, rather than supporting it. He says all IBM is global services – and a customer of Sun’s – while HP is a target customer. If they’d just get over it they’d be a great customer, he says.
In addition, five systems integrators have been chosen to kick off the Sun-Netscape Alliance’s preferred systems integrators initiative, which have been specifically trained on Sun’s systems. The five are: Andersen Consulting, Cap Gemini, Computer Sciences Corp, EDS and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The still unnamed Sun-Netscape alliance also announced version 4.1 of Netscape’s messaging server, featuring enhanced web-based email capabilities and version 4.0 of Sun’s internet mail server.
