Sun Microsystems' and Deloitte Consulting have extended
their partnership to combine business and technology
consulting.
Both companies set up their alliance in March 2002 to sell Sun
hardware and Deloitte Consulting services. The new partnership will
be known as Rightsizing Consolidation Program, and will be
delivered by consultants from both companies.
Fed up with the costs and effort of managing multiple servers
and storage devices, IT managers are looking to reduce the number
of servers in their environment, said Ken Won, director of Sun's
data centre program and channel development.
Sun advocates that those managers place their databases and
applications on a few large Sun servers, rather than spreading them
across several Unix servers.
Server consolidation is not a new concept, as many suppliers
have tried to help customers integrate and reduce their existing IT
infrastructure to match reduced IT budgets. Sun thinks it
differentiates itself from Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the
consolidation market through its partnership with Deloitte
Consulting, said Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for
Sun's enterprise system products group.
Both HP and IBM have large services organisations, but Deloitte
Consulting's focus is on the business processes behind the
technology, said Robert Frazzini, global leader of Deloitte
Consulting's technology integration group.
Deloitte Consulting can help Sun sell its products to
nontechnical executives, such as the chief financial officer, he
added.
Sun needed more of this type of business-level consulting
expertise, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata.
Deloitte Consulting is the business and IT consulting division
of accounting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service