By Paul Kunert
23 September 2008
Sun Microsystems is trying to claw its way out of the current industry-wide downturn by assembling a demand generation team to drum up leads across EMEA having parted company with Advanced Alchemy.
Yesterday Microscope revealed that Sun, for the first time in around four years, is hiking the level of marketing funds top tier partner can accrue each quarter to drive business development activities. .
Paul Flannery, UK and Ireland partner sales director at Sun said it was trying to increase awareness in the market, particularly of its T700 and T1000 systems.
“We are looking to invest across EMEA a significant amount of op-ex in our telesales-coverage, which we’ll roll out in two to three weeks to create demand and awareness.
“We want to create sales stage one type leads so we can start developing relationships with customers that we have not had before and then engage the channel to go and execute on that,” he said.
Flannery reckoned its portfolio had expanded in all directions in recent years and it needed to shout about it from the roof tops, “you have got to invest if you want to grow”.
Vendor demand generation activities are often criticised by resellers for not being of a sufficiently high quality, or creating conflict but many in Sun’s channel will be waiting to see if it had got the formula right.
David Cue, managing director at Q Associates said running lead generation activities was always challenging with different sales team going after business
“Sun’s head is in the right place but [the success of lead generation activities] will depend on how they execute, there needs to be the right type of controls in place,” he said.
The contract with demand generation firm Advanced Alchemy came to an end in December last year.
