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“We have evolved an exclusive strategy for our volume business”
Recently ranked the No 1 enterprise storage vendor, Sun Microsystems India is making significant strides in channels. It is now aiming for market leadership in the server segment. Over the past two quarters, Sun has reorganized its strategy by introducing a comprehensive channel program and exclusively appointing Redington for its volume server and storage business. Sudhir Nayar, Sun’s Director for Partner Sales, talks to CRN Executive Editor, Dhaval Valia about Sun’s game plan.
 Over the last two quarters, there has been positive buzz about Sun in the channels. Many partners, who so far had been staunch HP and/or IBM partners, have added Sun as an alternate brand to their portfolio. So, what has changed in your approach?
There are several reasons for the growing channel confidence in Sun. First, at the beginning of the year, we entirely changed our channel program. We consolidated our various channel programs under one—the Sun Partner Advantage program. This, of course, happened at the global level. Until that time, we had different programs for different countries. Consolidation of the program helped us bring more clarity to our engagement initiatives with our partners. Within SPA, we created various levels—associate, principal and executive—that helped us clearly define the relationship matrix with different types of partners.
A unique feature of SPA is that it gives partners the freedom to choose their area of specialization, which wasn’t the case earlier. Today, if a partner chooses to focus only on storage, the framework of SPA allows him to do so.
The second important element has been the launch of our SMB initiative called Storm. Under the Storm program, we clearly defined the work areas of Sun and our partners. We beefed up our market intelligence and created industry vertical solutions. We have put in place a strong lead-generation engine for partners, and have invested in training them and building their competencies. We have also invested in building a separate and cross-functional team for driving our Storm initiatives. These measures have helped in improving our channel strategy. We have added 40 new partners in the last two quarters, which takes our total count of authorized partners to 60. We aim to add 20 more.
You have appointed Redington to exclusively drive your volume business, while Ingram will focus on high-end products and services. What’s the rationale?
We realized that volume products require a different approach. We needed more partners, and also needed a stock-and-sell distribution model to penetrate the market, hence we decided to appoint a distributor exclusively focused on volume products. We have had this arrangement for two quarters, and it’s worked extremely well.
HP and IBM have both introduced a stock-and-sell distribution model for their mid-market storage and server products. However, the biggest challenge they face is the lack of skill-sets in channels to deploy such solutions. Even now a large number of their entry-level Unix servers, although sold through partners, are installed by their engineers. How are you handling this issue?
Lack of adequate skill-sets in channels is definitely a problem. At Sun, we have evolved a comprehensive support program for our volume business. We offer our partners different types of managed services such as consultancy, deployment and maintenance. All these services are packaged point services that help partners outsource any professional service from us, in case they lack particular skill-sets. What this means is that if a partner doesn’t have installation capabilities, he can buy the deployment service package from Redington, and Sun engineers will deploy the customer solution onsite on behalf of the partner.
The second aspect, we have focused on, is training and building competencies in channels. Over the last year we have increased our training budget, and have trained 150 partner representatives. Besides imparting technical and sales training, we believe that partners require managerial training because being a good manager is critical for retaining and motivating people. For this reason, we launched our Sun Catalyst program aimed at teaching managerial and leadership skills to mid-level and senior members of a company’s management. In the first year, we selected 20 senior managers from eight partner companies for year-long leadership training. We are nine months into this program, and those managers who are undergoing the training have shown exceptional progress. Next year, we aim to scale up this program to accommodate more partners.
Which industry verticals is Sun currently focused on?
In the SMB segment we have gained significant marketshare in manufacturing, education and research, mid-size BFSI and BPO segments. Retail and hospitality are the two new sectors, we added, last year. We have registered some fantastic deals for our storage products and solutions in the retail segment.
What can partners expect over the next 12 months?
Our financial year starts from July, and the beginning of the new fiscal has been good, with IDC and Gartner ranking us the largest player in the external storage market. According to IDC, Sun garnered 22 percent marketshare in terms of customer revenue for Q2 2008. While the Indian external storage market grew 48 percent year-on-year (Q2 2008 over Q2 2007), in customer revenue terms we grew 103 percent. We will continue to build on our gains by enabling our partners with better programs and more innovative products and services. |