Sun News - Features - Global iForce Initiative: Collaborating for Customer Success

Global iForce[sm] Initiative: Collaborating for Customer Success

The reach and range of the Web is driving unprecedented changes in the relationship between buyers and sellers, as well as the ability of companies to dynamically create new sources of supply, purchase, and employee, customer and partner interaction. Those enterprises that understand the potential of the Internet are able to build solutions that capitalize on new ways of reaching their customers, partners, suppliers, and end users.

For the past two decades, Sun Microsystems has maintained its focus on delivering rock-solid, network-ready systems. These systems provide the foundation for a secure IT infrastructure that can leverage next-generation computing. By sticking to its core competency - developing exceptional systems architecture for mission-critical computing - and building strong relationships with global industry partners, Sun has established itself as a leader and trusted advisor to enterprises worldwide.

Through the iForce Initiative, Sun customers can capitalize on an industry-leading collaborative model, pre-tested and integratable solutions, as well as a growing network of global iForce Centers - which help them to pre-test and integrate individualized, best-in-class solutions in a real-world environment.

The iForce[sm] Initiative

Sun's global iForce[sm] Initiative brings together Sun and its industry partners worldwide to deliver proven solutions that help customers - ranging from start-ups to large enterprises - harness the power of the Internet and drive business advantage. The iForce Initiative addresses customer business objectives by helping to reduce risk and speed time to implementation of solutions that help lower their total cost of ownership and increase the productivity of their assets.

A significant differentiator of the iForce Initiative is the dynamic relationship and interaction between Sun and its industry partners. This association between Sun, its industry partners and its customers is also called the iForce community. The community provides customers with a way to engage with Sun and its industry partners for the tools and solutions that help make it fast, easy and safe to leverage the network to improve business processes and reduce time-to-service. The iForce Initiative provides for an intra-community exchange of products, services, tools, certification, programs and expertise that fuels growth and allows all parties to remain focused on their individual core competencies, while teaming to deliver "best-practices solutions" to mutual customers. By working together and creating a community of best-in-class solution, system and service providers with a common emphasis on open, standards-based solutions, the iForce Initiative helps customers to accelerate time to service on the Sun platform.

Establishing its iForce community, and basing it on three values Sun has held since its inception - open interfaces, enabling network computing, and featuring a collaborative partnering model to complement its own platform offering - Sun is able to help its customers improve time-to-market and service with its tested, proven integratable, easy-to-deploy solutions with low risk and fast return on IT investment.

Through this Initiative, Sun and its systems, application and services partners deliver proven, best-in-class, end-to-end solutions to customers. The breadth and depth of third-party application and services offerings available provide customers choice in how they build and deploy solutions that address their unique needs and can help them gain a business advantage. iForce solutions build on the expertise of the entire iForce community to address the business issues most affecting retailers, manufacturers, educational institutions, healthcare providers, government agencies, and pharmaceutical, financial services, telecommunication and energy companies. These customer-driven solutions help enterprises leverage the network at every point in the business environment, including decision support systems, supply chain management, product design and development, email and communications, as well as many other functions.

Why The iForce Initiative Works

Core to Sun's philosophy is to cooperate with industry leaders on establishing standards and technologies, while enabling competition on implementation of those solutions.

Sun wants to give its customers the facilities to outsource to organizations who are Sun strategic industry partners. Sun's iForce solutions differ from competitive, single-company offerings in that the iForce community is designed to provide customers a rich array of products, programs and services, rather than single-vendor solutions. This means that, by building solutions on the Sun platform through the iForce initiative, companies can choose applications based on feature-set relevance to their business needs.

iForce Centers

One of the most successful programs within the iForce Initiative are its iForce Centers: iForce Ready Centers, iForce Competency Centers and strategic partner-run Authorized iForce Ready Centers. These centers are designed to help Sun's customers and industry partners utilize the company's Internet experience and proven methodologies for leveraging the network as the basis for building and deploying individualized, best-in-class solutions prior to deploying them in their own environment. There are more than 65 Sun and strategic partner-run iForce Centers worldwide providing customers access to a real-world environment and hands-on, in-person help to create architectural blueprints or guidelines for the design, development and deployment of smart services on the Sun platform. iForce Centers assist Sun customers with everything from brainstorming the technological options for creating an IT infrastructure, to proof-of-concept demonstrations, to actual pilot programs.

iForce Ready Centers examine an IT infrastructure as a set of logical and physical components such as applications, Webtop and desktop devices, networking, security and storage. The project team builds a customized, demonstrable proof-of-concept of the technology supporting a company's business needs. This service leverages business reference scenarios developed through Sun's experience connecting the world to the Internet.

Proof-of-Concepts and iForce Solutions

The iForce Initiative brings together bring together key contributors to the solution value chain - Sun, its industry partners and customers - to build and deploy proven solutions that can be quickly implemented with less risk.

One such solution is a proof-of-concept (PoC); a prototype software and hardware solution developed as a collaborative effort between customers, Sun and system and services partners within the iForce Ready Center that address a specific business need of a specific customer (e.g. petroleum exchange). Once complete, the iForce Ready Center may take a PoC that has been developed and make some business or technical changes to create a generic solution so it can be replicated by other customers with similar business needs. A customer would take the generic solution and customize it to meet their unique environment and to reflect a particular vendor choice. This new variation can be tested at the iForce Ready Center or fine-tuned in a customer's environment.

iForce Solutions often address a larger customer business issue than a PoC, but similarly help give customers a jump on the deployment process and speed time to return on investment. These solutions provide a scalable, proven blend of software, systems, networking, financing and consulting services - as well as iForce partner solutions and services - all in one simple, manageable relationship. iForce solutions represent a pre-tested aggregation of best-in-class industry applications leveraging Sun servers, complete storage solutions and Sun ONE architecture platform. They are scalable, easy to customize and follow open standards to help ensure that customers can implement solutions compatible with their existing infrastructure, and are prepared to take advantage of the infrastructure of tomorrow. Many solutions are based on SunTone[sm] Certified applications and services that have met rigorous standards for quality.

For more information: Sandy Hamel, WW iForce Communications Manager, sandy.hamel@sun.com