Sun sets higher bar with telemarketing budget

Lisa Sieker, Sun Microsystems

Sun is increasing its telemarketing activities across Europe to help drum up opportunities for its channel partners.

Despite recently announcing plans to cut another 5,000 to 6,000 staff, the server and storage vendor insists it is still raising investment in some areas of the business.

Lisa Sieker, Sun’s vice president for systems marketing and business planning, confirmed that telemarketing is one area primed for investment.

“We are undergoing a reduction in force, but there are areas where we are making investments, and telemarketing is one that is strategically important to us,” she said.

“Our software is generating a lot of demand and is a tremendous lead for Sun. We need to turn the interest we are seeing from the open-source community into a revenue stream for Sun and its partners.”

As an example, Sieker said 2,000 customers downloaded Sun’s new Open Storage offering in the first few weeks since its launch. That will give Sun’s telesales agents leads to follow up and qualify before they are passed on to the most qualified partners.

Additionally, partners are being handed the first tranche of leads generated from a pan-European midmarket telesales campaign that began on 1 October.

Sun outsourced the grunt work to a third-party firm that passes opportunities to Sun’s internal team to qualify. The leads are then handed to partners based on their competency and location.