Sun rolls out financing services

With the burgeoning small and medium enterprises market firmly in sight, Sun Microsystems India has rolled out a series of initiatives, the latest of which being the setting up of the India arm of the Sun Microsystems Global Financial Services (SMGFS) division.

The division, which kicked off operations at the beginning of 2006, has partnered with several leading Indian banks and financial institutions to provide customers with 'creative' funding options, to aid purchase of Sun's latest systems and technologies without the need for significant capital investment.

The roll out of services through SMGFS, for Sun, comes at a point of time when Sun is beginning to firm up its presence, both from a product as well as a market reach perspective, to tackle the SMB space.

Said N L Narayan, head, SMGFS in India: "The services of the division would be available to both enterprise class customers as well as those from the SMB space, though we expect the latter to see greater value in our offering."

The roll out of SMGFS in India is part of a planned enlargement of an international team of Sun experts so as to cover regions where the demand for financing alternatives is growing rapidly, such as Asia and Latin America. The team is also responsible for designing and rolling out country specific programmes such as financing on zero per cent interest, leasing, etc.

The roll out of SMGFS comes close on the heels of a series of product announcements, which are targetted squarely at broadening Sun's portfolio of solutions for small to mid-sized customers.

Sun's Galaxy family of servers, launched in the fourth quarter of 2005 and the Ultra SPArc T1 processor (code named Niagara) were two big-ticket announcements, which Sun hopes to capitalise on, in their foray into the small to mid segments of the market.

Sun's reach into the SMBME space was further enhanced last year with Sun's partnership announcement with eSys Technologies India, as their second distributor in the country (the earlier one being Ingram Micro).

This partnership gave Sun greater access to customers who were geographically spread across the country, and more specifically across Tier II and III cities.

With the roll out of SMGFS, Sun hopes to further its growth and penetration into the Indian IT infrastructure market, making Sun's technology more accessible to a wider base of customers across the country.