Sun aims for bigger portion of services pie

BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems's Client Solutions Organization (CSO) completed one year of its existence in June this year.

CSO, which was started essentially to help Sun's customers and partners in getting better value from Sun's technology, is now gearing itself to become the engine to rev up the company's services revenue.

The company's service offerings include maintenance, support services, client solutions, services account management and break-fix.

At present, services makes up around $1.02 billion of the company's overall global revenues and Sun hopes to increase this to $1.5 billion in a couple of years.

But unlike rivals like IBM and HP who have gone all out into various kinds of services around multiple hardware vendors, a conservative Sun prefers to stick to services around its product stable.

Stressing that Sun still stands out in a hardware industry that is moving towards commoditization, Anil Valluri, country director, CSO, Sun Microsystems India said, “Our value to customers will come from understanding the value of our technology. We are doing all the right things architecturally. Now, customers are looking beyond products.”

This could well be a strategic leap for Sun, which has traditionally preferred to focus on its products. In order to lend greater visibility and leverage on the company's existing technology; new product launches like the Opteron based Galaxy x86 servers and 2005 acquisitions such as SeeBeyond, Tarantella and StorageTek, Sun has restructured the CSO into seven technology practices.

These key practices center around areas including data center; storage; identity management; enterprise web services; desktop and mobility; managed services and the recent addition- Solaris x86.

“We want give Solaris a push and make it a de facto standard,” said Valluri.

He also adds that Sun is focusing on preventive customer care than the traditional break-fix model. According to Valluri, CSO, which acts as the company's consulting arm, would provide more depth to customers.

“Sun customers have not realized our technological potential because we depended a lot on our ecosystem. Now with CSO, besides letting our partners sell to customers, we are also implementing solutions for them.”

In the past, the company handled Sun's top 50 accounts directly. Now with CSO playing a wider role, Sun is able to do more face-to-face interactions with its Fortune 500 customers. So where would that leave the partners?

“We are only complementing our partners' work rather than short-changing them,” defends Valluri. His mandate is clear. “Sun intends to put in more software and services into its play by piggybacking on our intellectual property and technology.”

However, he said that Sun would not be averse to integrating third party hardware (such as SAN switches) provided they are products that do not compete directly with Sun's portfolio.

“We are in the best shape today to deliver the products and services-given the kind of acquisitions and server technology we have in place,” said a confident Valluri.