Sun’s moves in the SMB space

Late last week I had an interesting conversation with Christine Buery of Sun Microsystems. Christine is heading up the new Sun initiatives in the SMB market, and we talked about a number of things that should interest IT folks in certain parts of SMB-land. It starts with how Sun views the SMB market, and ends with how the company is moving product to smaller organizations.

One of the things that interests me whenever I talk to a vendor is exactly how they define “SMB”. Christine’s answer was one I’ve heard often, but with a twist: She said that SMB, in Sun’s language, is a company with fewer than 1,000 employees. That’s not unusual. The uncommon part is the qualifier Sun adds — companies with fewer than 1,000 employees and a high need for I.T. differentiation. This means, ultimately, companies with compute needs far in excess of what their headcount would indicate. What sort of companies qualify for this classification? Think Web 2.0 companies (Craigslist was mentioned several times), engineering firms, or technical-industry consultancies. The big point — if you’re looking for a white-box server to handle basic back-office tasks for your small business, then Sun is probably not the right answer. If, on the other hand, you’re looking to host the next big software as a service commercial offering, then you might well be in the Sun target market.

Buery talked about Sun’s partnerships with AMD, Intel, and Microsoft, and the acquisition of MySQL as key ingredients in Sun’s progress toward the SMB market. She then went on to explain that Sun has revamped its sales channel, adding partners like CDW to make it easier to buy Sun products — Buery referred to the concept of “flexibility of acquisition” more than once to indicate that the company understand why a small, tech-savvy firm might not want (or need) to get all their hardware through a traditional VAR.

The question is, though, why would Sun systems be attractive to a small business, even one that meets the qualifications set by the vendor? The answer in a nutshell is flexibility. Sun hardware offers the possibility of migrating from Windows Server to Linux to Solaris without changing your physical system. I know a lot of small business IT folks who would scoff at the possibility of moving up — who could need more than Linux? — but the fact is that an operating system like Solaris offers security and manageability in forms that are easier to work with than those found in Linux (or, for that matter, any of the Windows operating systems).

Before we finished the phone call, Buery said something that echoed a theme I’ve been hearing for a couple of years now: SMB IT concerns are no longer substantially different than those of larger enterprises. There are differences in scale, but not in essential needs or problems. This recognition is good for small business IT folks, because it means that vendors are increasingly open to smaller organizations joining their previously-closed enterprise list. It’s good to see Sun taking steps in this direction — and it will be good to see other enterprise IT vendors moving along the SMB path.