19 November 2007
by Paul Kunert
Sun Microsystems’ Sun Partner Advantage (SPA) programme is being extended to appeal more to software developers, by allowing them to reach top-level accreditations and accrue higher rebates without selling hardware.
Piloted in the US, the Elite scheme should hit the UK by the end of the month. It is designed to drum up more support from partners to build applications around its Service-Oriented Architecture, Java and Global desktops stacks.
There is a software track in SPA already, but to achieve Executive level accreditation, partners must also sell servers or storage. This does not always work for software houses, said the vendor.
"We are creating an SPA model that allows software partners to play solely in that space," said Paul Flannery, Sun partner sales director. "Today they would have [to sell technologies] that may or may not be relevant to their business model."
Top-tier partners will get account management, access to marketing programmes, preferential status at Sun events and additional rebates, he said.
"The idea behind Elite is that there will be more financial incentives [to build on our applications]," said Flannery.
With a middleware stack the size of Sun’s, Simon Welch, marketing director at CDP Horizon UK, said the move was common sense: "It wants to get as many partners on board as it can; these are different to the ones that Sun has typically engaged with before."
