With two profitable quarters in a row following five quarters of loses, the big question is can Sun sustain its growth, and if so, what will it be built on? If the meeting I attended at Sun's offices in San Francisco are any indication, a lot of new growth is going to come from revamping its partner and channel program with a special emphasis on developing relationships with ISVs --in some cases startups -- that With two profitable quarters in a row following five quarters of loses, the big question is can Sun sustain its growth, and if so, what will it be built on?If the meeting I attended at Sun’s offices in San Francisco are any indication, a lot of new growth is going to come from revamping its partner and channel program with a special emphasis on developing relationships with ISVs –in some cases startups — that are on high technology’s cutting edge. Sun brought up Greenplum, an open-source database vendor for business intelligence and data warehousing, as an example of what it is trying to do. Greenplum is built on PostgreSQL and is a far cry from early open-source database management systems. Greenplum CEO Bill Cook says the company competes in a range of systems that can handle one terabyte to one petabyte of data. In fact, although neither Sun nor Greenplum would name names, they said a combined Sun-Greenplum data warehouse just won a major contract with a Blue Chip media company against Teradata.“This is a half-petabyte system as a starting point,” said Cook. By working with younger companies, diamonds in the rough who can help businesses use technology as a competitive edge, Sun, under Jonathan Schwartz, is trying to recapture some of the technology glamor that it used to have.At the same time, BI solutions like those from Greenplum give Sun the opportunity to develop new relationships on the business side of the enterprise rather than having relationships almost exclusively with the IT side. Having an x64-bit OS doesn’t hurt either and is opening a lot of doors for Sun with both the ISVs and customers. Sun has 4,500 applications shipping on Sparc chips and 3,000 on the x64 platform.Sun will be working with more companies like Greenplum, which went live last spring, to tightly integrate the hardware and software and then educate its channel partners so that they can sell it as a complete solution.As of July 1, Sun is also drastically revamping its channel strategy, creating an SPA (Sun Partner Advantage) program. This makes sense considering that Sun does 70 percent of its business through the channel. Although Cate said there is more to SPA than just reviewing the level of competency of its partners, that’s how I see it.As of July 1, there will be five partner levels based on how a partner performs and “operating expense dollars will be tiered to the level of partner achievements,” said Cate. Member Level is an entry level and is typified by partners that buy Sun systems off the Web site and resell them. Associate Level requires a higher degree of commitment, and a partner at this level has access to all of Sun’s products, usually specializes in certain solutions, and signs a partner contract with Sun.Principal Level has tougher standards, says Cate, and a partner must show more competency about Sun products.Finally there is Executive Level, which is exemplified by companies that have made “extraordinary” investments in Sun products, according to Cate, and they should understand all of Sun’s technologies. Sun’s fiscal 4th quarter ends on June 30th, so we will have to wait until then to see if they can make it three successful quarters in a row. Technology Industry