Sun To Extend Service Program To The Channel

Sun launched the offering, one of its newest managed services options, in June, said Marissa Peterson, executive vice president of Sun Services. The offering provides "holistic management" of data centers, identifying network vulnerabilities and risks up front and then engaging in activities to mitigate risks.

By December, Sun will extend availability to provide Sun Preventive Services to partners, Peterson said. This will help Sun do two things— extend the services beyond the current "brake-fix" model and offer more support for heterogeneous networks, she said.

"We want to extend SPS to environments beyond those that run on Sun [hardware and software]," Peterson said. "Once we have partners on board, we will be much more capable of supporting heterogeneous networks."

According to Peterson, who assumed her position in March after the departure of her predecessor, Patricia Sueltz, Sun Services has been growing at a speedy clip. In the fourth fiscal quarter ended June 30, Sun Services broke the billion-dollar revenue mark for the first time. And in its first quarter of fiscal 2005—a traditionally slow quarter—Sun Services achieved record revenue of $952 million, she said.

Peterson said Sun hopes to sustain this kind of growth, and partners are a huge part of that plan. Sun Services already outsources 40 percent of its services delivery to partners, and that percentage likely will grow over the next year.

"If anything, what you'll see is we're going to focus even more on the partner community," she said. "That is how we're going to achieve the growth rates and the scale."

Peterson said managed services are the hottest area of growth for her division, attributing this to customers' desire to go to a single source when data-center issues arise.

"We're seeing tremendous growth in managed services in terms of site engagements," Peterson said. "Customers may have many vendors in their data centers and want one single point of contact. That's growing."

In addition to SPS, Sun also recently launched a Managed Security Services offering in conjunction with VeriSign, which is the first partner delivering the new service to customers.