Sun Inks Deal with Tech Data to Push Entry Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems announced this week that it has signed an alliance with Tech Data, one of the largest computer and electronics distributors in the world, to help it peddle entry servers and storage into the midrange server market. Sun inherited a relationship with Tech Data, based in Clearwater, Florida, a few years ago when it acquired Linux server appliance maker Cobalt.

Tech Data was the primary distributor of the Cobalt servers, and after the acquisition of Cobalt by Sun, this continued to be the case. Tech Data has been selling Sun';s entry LX50 Lintel servers as well, and the agreement between the two companies announced today extends the products that Tech Data can distribute to its reseller channel substantially. Tech Data does not sell products to end users, but, rather, has its own channel of thousands of resellers, which have the real relationships with IT buyers.

According to Bill Cate, director of the iForce partner program in the United States, Tech Data will become the third master distributor for Sun';s products in the United States. GE Access and Arrow Electronics are the dominant distributors that Sun relies on to push its hardware and software into the reseller channel. Both of these companies already sell all of the entry products that Tech Data will sell, as well as midrange and high-end servers and storage that Tech Data will not be allowed to sell. Tech Data is focused on the midmarket, where companies are buying Wintel machines and just getting interested in Lintel machines. That said, Cate says some of the bigger reseller partners with Tech Data are resellers of AIX and HP-UX iron from rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard. This alliance represents the first time that these resellers will be allowed to push Solaris products.

Under the alliance, any Tech Data reseller that simply registers to sell Sun products will be able to sell Sun';s LX50, V60, and V65 servers when running Linux (which are based on X86 processors from Advanced Micro Devices), the Sun ONE software stack for these boxes, and related services. Those with a tighter relationship with Tech Data can become authorized resellers and gain access to selling these same Linux machines, plus variants running Solaris, as well as the V100, V120, V210, and V240 Sparc/Solaris servers, Cobalt appliances, and midrange storage products (the StorEdge 3000 and various tape subsystems) that are appropriate to these machines. Authorized resellers will also have access to comarketing dollars and services that registered partners will not have.

By having a big partner like Tech Data push its Lintel and Solaris iron into a new channel, Sun hopes to keep building momentum in the entry server space. A lot of the action in the server market is for one-way and two-way servers, and Sun needs every ally it can muster to take on Dell, IBM, and HP down here.

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