Furthering Sun Microsystems' support and development of the South African and the global mid-sized business market, the company has announced an initiative focusing on substantial investment in and increased collaboration with its iForce Partners.
In the next 18 months, Sun will aim to help medium enterprises to optimise their existing architectures and lower their TCO (total cost of ownership) through pre-tested, integratable and easy-to-implement vertical and horizontal solutions that address their specific business needs.
"The solutions will leverage Sun and our partners' expertise by addressing critical enterprise issues such as security, scalability, performance, service and support," explains Daryl Blundell, sales solutions manager at Sun Microsystems SA.
This announcement comes shortly after Sun SA's appointment of Orcom as its channel development partner (CDP) for the country - a move which entails the recruitment of value-added resellers (VARs) to promote and sell Sun technologies to SA's general business segment, approximately 80% of the market.
Comments Mika Yamamoto Krammer, senior small and medium business analyst at Gartner: "Partnerships with mid-sized enterprises' trusted advisor network are key to success in this market. "Vendors who recognise that gains in this market only come with time and investment, understand that the key to cracking this multibillion-dollar opportunity is partnerships."
Sun plans to create a mid-size enterprise end-users advisory council and offer a portal for businesses on its Web site http://sun.com/iforce.
The portal will, for example, enable potential customers to search for iForce Partner solutions by industry or horizontal application and access information on Sun's growing line of products suited for mid-sized businesses.
These products include the Sun LX50, which runs Linux or the Solaris Operating Environment (OE), and an extensive range of Solaris platform-based Sun Fire servers (go to www.sun.com).
Additionally, a portion of Sun's growing network of iForce Centres will offer industry-specific solutions that help enterprises make informed decision on the solutions they choose for their business purposes.
Already more than a 100 solutions and reference architectures are installed at the Centres which enables companies to reduce complexity, cost, time and risk to deploy new technology.
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The iForce Initiative is a community of Sun, its customers and best-in-class iForce partners working together to create and deliver customer-driven solutions that enable our customers to leverage the network to improve business processes. Built around a dynamic, interactive relationship model and providing access to a global network of more than 70 iForce Centres, this program helps customers engage with Sun and its industry partners to reduce risk when deploying solutions. By establishing its iForce Initiative, Sun is able to help its customers improve time-to-market with proven integratable, easy-to-deploy iForce Solutions.
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