Sun hopes to be in tone with its resellers

Sun Microsystems has announced SunTone, a new branding and certification programme.

Sun Microsystems has announced SunTone, a new branding and certification programme.

The SunTone programme aims to give users peace of mind when buying Sun equipment and services from VARs by giving them a seal of approval from the vendor.

Robert Bell, a representative of Sun VAR Horizon Open Systems, said the scheme made sense for attacking the internet service provider (ISP) market.

"Our customers are a new channel. SunTone guarantees the ISP is always available, is highly resilient and has backup systems so there will be no interruption of business applications," he said.

This is particularly important as more businesses start to use the web, he said. "SunTone will get a lot bigger. It's still in its infancy. It will be the 'Intel Inside' badge of 2000."

Although the first solution providers have only been accredited for a few months, Sun plans to offer higher levels of accreditation every six to nine months.

Keith Roberts, iForce marketing manager at Sun, said resellers sometimes have to work harder to reassure nervous customers that they are up to the job, especially if the reseller has recently moved into the application services provider (ASP) market.

"It is quite a paradigm shift for some people to let others into their business," he said. "This is a way of proving in advance that VARs and ASPs can do it."

The scheme is part of Sun's 'anytime, anywhere, access to anything' strategy.

"The idea of SunTone was a coming together of many things from all sides," Roberts said. "We have been asked before if Dell or Compaq could do this. There is no reason why they should not. It gives value to suppliers and users."

Unfortunately, SunTone is only for Sun VARs. "This is not cross-platform," said Roberts.

Sun hopes to form a SunTone council in the UK to explore what to work on next. Any company which is accredited can be on the council, and Bell expects Horizon to be there.