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As part of its long-term strategic alliance with Intel, Sun Microsystems has announced four new products created in collaboration with the vendor, including a workstation, two servers and a blade.

Since announcing the alliance last January, Greg O'Keefe, market development manager, Intel Americas, says the partnership has been very positive for its channel.

“We're excited to be able to work with Sun's channel partners as well as our own now,” O'Keefe said. “We see the working relationship as a new opportunity to not only sell Intel and Sun solutions, but to solve end-customer needs as well.”

Under the alliance, Intel now endorses the Sun Solaris Operating System (OS) as a tier one, open source OS. In addition, Sun has agreed to come up with a family of workstations and servers are based on Intel's Xeon processors.

Doug Cooper, country manager of Intel Canada, says he hopes Intel's work with Sun has brought about a range of options for system builders that build whitebox servers.

“This gives system builders opportunities to optimize on the products and to differentiate themselves in the market place,” Cooper said. “In general, servers have always been a strong proponent in the market in terms of opportunities. Wherever there are new options, there will be opportunities for the channel to go after markets that they may not have participated in before.”

Mike Morrison, x64 business development manager, Sun Microsystems of Canada, says Sun and Intel have since focused their efforts on addressing some of the business challenges that customers face, such as requests for more performance, better systems management, or system design.

“Intel has done a lot with the processor design to reduce power consumption,” Morrison said. “Sun has taken that a step further with our system design so now users use up to 30 per cent less power and they get better efficiency, combined with better performance all while using a smaller processor.”

It's a message of doing more with less that Sun wants to convey to its channel partners, who Morrison says play an important role in Sun's go-to-market strategy.

“We're really focused on our partners driving the market for us because we don't do a lot of direct sales,” Morrison said. “They're really an extension of our sales force so they are a key play for us in our strategy.”

Currently, Morrison says Sun has 72 partners spread throughout the country, and is always looking for more. However, he says Sun's partner recruitment strategy is very strategic in its approach.

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