Sun Teaching Partners How to Sell
Sun Microsystems aren’t exactly salespeople, but the company is about to tell other people exactly how they can make money.
Today the company will begin to educate the members of its Partner Advantage Program about pre-sales, marketing, systems engineering and architecture – things that are part of Sun’s own training pack.
Partners are set to receive lessons on reference implementations for MySQL Server and web infrastructure, Service Orientated Architectures, identity management, Sun’s Xvm virtualization, the Sun virtual desktop, and open storage. In the meantime, Sun will allow members of its Open Access Program to sell Suns software portfolio to third distributors.
The training for Partners will be highly beneficial, as Sun’s years of experience lie in identity management software, virtual desktop, open storage and virtualization. Sun looks to be centring its focus around reference implementations and on deployment to the web. Sun wants people to suggest more reference implementations while its consulting practice will serve up more implementations based on successful customer engagements.
Service Orientated Architectures is the SeeBeyond code that Sun bought back in 2005 and since open sourced. Neither SeeBeyond nor MySQL has turned into a cash cow for the company.
MySQL was bought by Sun this year and has only a handful of staff in the company’s 40,000 strong employees. The staff are headed up by Marten Mickos, who has said he has been in a lot of meetings with potential Sun customers.
Bill Cate, Sun’s senior director of global channel marketing sad that the company wants partners to succeed, and need to hire “some talented people” like software architects if they want to benefit from the teachings.
The company’s director of software marketing said that Sun’s hardware partners had requested training on how to sell MySQL.
Leave a Comment