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.
