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| Branding | The problem: Sun has become disassociated from what should be its strongest brand:- SPARC. IHVs and VARs in the storage market sometimes ask me about my other publication. "What's that SPARC thing about?" they ask. "The Sun market" I reply. "Oh. We sell in the Sun market, it's important to us, but I've never heard of SPARC." When was the last time you saw an ad from Sun with the folowing kind of headline? Sun's new SPARCmainframe! Uses good old fashioned solid SPARC technology, still scaling processor architecture after 14 years. Sun started winding down its branding programs for SPARC in 1995, when it launched its first 64 bit Ultra 1, and 2 workstations. Before then all workstations and servers had been given names with a SPARC prefix, such as SPARCstation, SPARCserver etc. The Ultra was a weak brand. Ultra what? Other Ultra brands in the computer market include the better known UltraSCSI. So that was a tactical mistake. But in 1996 Sun went even further and decided that the JavaStation was the hot new product of the future. When I went to a Sun partners event the following year the word SPARC was not even mentioned. "This is a company which is trying to break away from the one thing which has made it successful" I remember thinking. I parodied Sun's current relation to the SPARC brand in my spoof article about Sun's shutdown in July Diary of a Workaholic Sun Partners Program Manager . I make no apology for quoting this extract below. "Next, take a look at another historic program, called "SPARC-compatible." When I first saw it in the research notes, I looked up "SPARC" in a dictionary, but unlike "Catalyst", it wasn't there. Guessed it might be foreign, and tried a German online dictionary. No luck there either. Asked researcher. She told me it was a pre-Solaris, pre-Java, pre-Jiro legal term, like a copyright symbol, and never used in marketing communications in any font size larger than 6pt in print or 20 pixels high on the web. I looked at the program details and was horrified to find that it included a lot of our competitors in the Solaris Compatible and Sun Ready markets. As including direct competitors is one of the no-no's for the new program, decided not to read any more about it." What should be done now?
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Selected Reader Comments:- Reader Eliezer Ramm, who comments below, works in a web
services / ASP company. |
| Public Relations | The problem: During most of the last year Sun's press releases about market share and its business growth have been disengenuous, and deliberately contrived to create the misleading impression that things have been very much better than they actually were. Examples abound in our news archive where you will see my own comments and warnings. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and many Sun users (if they haven't been seeing the news on this site) will be very surprised and shaken by the apparently sudden turnaround. What should be done now? Sun's PR department always prefer putting out positive messages rather than negative ones. But as the company needs to start a recovery plan, they should quote a few less optimistic statistics from the pre recessionary days and admit that Sun is doing worse than the IT market at large. That's already started this week. | |
| Advertising | The problem: For years Sun's advertising has been aimed at showing that Sun can waste money on advertising in the (badly targeted) consumer media just as well as the worst of the dotcoms. The message, if there was any message in most of that advertising, has been saying to me (and to many of Sun's partners) "We at Sun are so successful that we have money to burn, and this stupid ad, in a media which isn't even a computer media, proves it." Sun has historically shown a deep aversion to advertising in independently managed publications which are aligned to the Sun, SPARC or Solaris platform, unless it can exert some form of control. In many cases, such as the Sunxxx.com sites, it has tried to close those independent publications down. What should be done now? Spend less on print advertising. Spend more advertising on the web. Sun marketers don't have to like every article they read in publications like this one. The important fact is that independent publications like this do serve a useful purpose and are used by lots of readers who are trying to find their way around a very complex market. Advertising is a way to communicate to those people and expand the overall SPARC compatible market. | |
| Resellers | The problem: Sun had a very successful relationship with VARs in the 1980's and 90's. Sun's proud boast was that aimed to sell 80% of Sun product through resellers. Since the recession started, it has seemed that Sun would like to change the ratio around the other way. The practise of shifting systems via eBay and bypassing the VAR channel and taking more business direct, started long before the IT recession. Sun has been enviously eyeing Dell Computer's business model and working to disentangle itself from the hundreds of companies which propelled Sun from an unknown to a major server platform provider. That alienates many VARs (I know, I talk to more of them than Sun does.) Looking ahead, as systems become more complex, and the server becomes a smaller part of the cost of each system, the role of VARs is going to expand, not diminish. What should be done now? Sun should just admit that it was wrong. It needs VARs. Now more than ever. Sun should give VARs money to educate them into better marketers, so they can do a better job of understanding the emerging markets, and the selling opportunities for SPARC systems. | |
| Storage | The problem: I identified the problems of Sun's failure to grasp the importance of the emerging storage market early in 2000, and wrote about it extensively. (See - Will Sun Succeed in the STORAGE market?) Since then, Sun has been on a buying spree of storage companies. But it was mostly too little, too late. To understand the scale of Sun's monumental failure in storage, particularly if you are a shareholder in SUNW, try to imagine what the shares would be worth if you added half of EMC's revenue to Sun's during the last year. That's a simplification, but it gives you a true picture of the opportunities lost. EMC has its own problems now, which I write about in STORAGEsearch, but the storage market is still growing. What should be done now? The list of acquired storage companies keeps growing, but there are still more than 500 manufacturers and around a 100 software companies listed on STORAGEsearch, including recent storage startups. Should Sun buy another company now? I don't think so. Maybe the least worst strategy now is to resell other storage products, which Sun did before, and with the recent HDS deal, Sun continues to do now. | |
| IHVs | The problem: The SPARC market has always needed Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) to introduce the latest technologies such as iSCSI, InfiniBand, NAS, or whatever it is at the time, but the barriers to entry for IHVs who want to introduce new products into the Sun market are too high... Because the Wintel market is larger and easier to access, there's a risk that Sun users will not always get the best products first. IHVs often tell me that it's very difficult understanding the Sun market, and selling into it. That's unlike the Wintel market which is very well served with a wide range of independent information sources and publications. New IHVs usually go to Sun to find out how they can market their products to the installed Sun base and get reliable marketing information. This is a problem with the IHVs rather than Sun, who will happily sign them up to marketing program and sell them some advertising on Sun's own web site. Then they're left on their own. Unless they successfully identify that "SPARC thing" with the Sun market, and end up safely here. What should be done now? The real solution is that the independent vendors in the Sun market need to improve their market research about publications and information channels in the SPARC market, and spend more money advertising on them. My own list of Sun, Solaris & SPARC portals, and Linux portals is far from complete, but it's a good start. Sun should refer vendors to external independent publications, which are aligned with the SPARC platform. Instead of just one publication they should have a list. That will help their partners better without costing Sun anything. Sun does actually have links to this publication, but in some very obscure pages in a massive web site. I'm suggesting they have a SPARC publications list, including their own publications, linked from their home page. Another helpful suggestion for IHVs is to consult our advertising page because this publication is the #1 source of independent information about SPARC compatible vendors. | |
| End users | The problem: Without end users who believe that Sun's products and the company itself are going in the right direction, there would be no future. In recent years Sun has become arrogant, disconnected and unapproachable to many people who would regard themselves as Sun users or evangelists. Worse still, many of Sun's communications about where it's going and what it thinks is important have been confused with a jumble of hard to understand inconsistent and irrelevant marketing slogans. "Is Sun going into the wireless business?" I've been asked. "Does anyone know what this Jiro stuff is?" Any company, as large as Sun does inevitably get involved in many strands of product and technology development, but the main communication channels from Sun have been blurred by a fog of hype which at best has been confusing, and at worst, has been insulting the intelligence of its users. Sun is not going to control the desktop anytime in this parallel universe. JavaStations and their descendants do not a great company make. Hyping every crazy idea which proclaims the end of the Wintel platform, is just nuts. Ignoring the reality of heterogeneous systems has been folly. The Solution Sun should admit that its users often know more about the realities of computing that Sun. Sun's strengths in the past are the key to its recovery and success in the future...
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