The annual Sun Symposium, attended by 80 executives from channel partners and ISVs in countries throughout sub-Sahara Africa, was held in Kasane in Northern Botswana at the end of September.
The three-day event highlighted Sun's activities over the past year including new product announcements, acquisitions and channel strategies and Sun's vision globally and - more to the point - in Africa.
Vito Bonafede, Sun Microsystems' regional manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, confirmed at the event the company's commitment to the indirect reseller model, and Sun's resource increase in Africa. He recounted the exceptional performance that was achieved in the last financial year and the potential of another good year ahead.
Sun, the leading provider in server technology, also announced its two top performing channel partners: best systems provider was named as City Business Computer (CBC) from Nigeria; while Cape Town-based Breakpoint Solutions was awarded best solutions provider.
"The awards were not only based on the revenue generated by our partners but also on key elements such as new customer growth - CBC introduced us to a number of new customers in Nigeria, and Breakpoint has done well in maintaining existing accounts," explains Jos Nickmans, channel and alliance manager for Sun Microsystems sub-Sahara Africa.
Delegates gained insight into Sun's vision and the recent alliances it has formed such as the partnerships with Microsoft and chip manufacturer AMD, Sun's acquisition of StorageTek, Tarantella and SeeBeyond as well as its recent launch of the SunFire x64 multi-core servers codenamed Galaxy.
In addition, third-party vendors such as SAP and Oracle and US-based voice messaging company OpenWave, attended the event, presenting their technologies and demonstrating how they can be used in the African context.
Keynote presentations were delivered by Grant Ruesch, senior VP, partners and alliances sales at Sun who introduced the new Partner Advantage Programme; and Marc Tremblay, VP and chief architect processors, who described Sun's technology road map.
Jacqui Gogele, a Sun Microsystems consultant responsible for the development of alliance programmes, said the symposium was an ideal opportunity for the executives from all over Africa to network and share opportunities.
"Few vendors offer this kind of facility for their partners who often work in isolation. Even though many of the partners do compete in certain areas, they complement each other elsewhere and these opportunities were very apparent at the symposium.
"An interesting development was the introduction of the Sun Oracle developer centre that is a combined technology and business hub which has been established on behalf of the channel where ISVs have an infrastructure to test specific solutions.
"By the time a proposal reaches a customer it has been thoroughly tested to ensure that the solution is workable and suits a specific environment," Gogele said.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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