Intel vs AMD vs SPARC

I am presenting to a Sun sales team later today and was asked to tell them if they should be selling Sun servers with Intel, AMD, or SPARC CPUs. It is a pretty easy answer, all of the above. Our recent alliance with Intel by no means indicates we are de-committing from AMD. AMD's Opteron processor continues to offer performance advantages on many workloads. Furthermore, neither our Intel nor or AMD partnerships distract from our continued focus on SPARC based servers. We are, in fact, bringing more new SPARC servers to the market this year than ever before, including powerful new servers based on the Niagara 2 processor among others. So what is my presentation today going to say? It is all about choice. Sun offers the widest range of customer choice, at the CPU level, at the operating system level, and throughout our product offerings. While it sometimes complicates things for our sales teams, it simplifies things for our customers as we can offer them the best solution for their specific requirements.

Posted on: Feb 22, 2007

Posted by: marchamilton

Category: General

Tags: none

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Comments:

Good to see that the sales droids are getting information from people who understand the technology. Its been my sad experience that the Sun sales people I've encountered really don't know enough about the technology they sell. They've usually had to resort to dragging tech guys along for anything remotely technical.

Mind you, we're involved in a large cluster purchase at the moment and I've been suprised by the lack of technical know-how in quite a few of the sales teams who visited.

Are there no tech companies who have techies as sale guys? Or who train their sales people in technical skills?

Posted by Phillip Fayers on February 22, 2007 at 02:22 PM PST #

It is not uncommon at Sun for a systems engineer or others with a technical background to go into sales. However, we have such a broad product line today that few people can have in-depth technical knowledge in all our products. That is why we actually have organized the company around 4 product groups, servers, storage, software, and services. Each product group then has its own set of product technical specialists. The Sun sales rep that comes to take you out to lunch should be working with product specialists from each of the product groups.

I run the global technical team for the server product group and architecting large complex clusters is one of our specialities. So if you aren't getting the support you need from your local sales team, please followup directly with me and I will make sure my team gets involved. It looks like you are in the UK and several of my team are based there and I am sure they would love to help.

Posted by Marc Hamilton on February 22, 2007 at 02:58 PM PST #

It's also hard to get the really skilled technical people to go into sales... and while they might enjoy a showcasing of their achivement to an appreciative, i.e. *technical* crowd, engineers want to deal with technology, not peddle stuff door-to-door... that's simply not interesting.

Posted by UX-admin on February 23, 2007 at 12:02 AM PST #

Sun has a great technical career path up to and including technical director and VP positions. By the way, our hiring is also ramping up so if you know any great technical folks at our competitors who want to work for a really great company and showcase their achievements with some of the most appreciative customers in the world, have them drop me an email or checkout <a href="http://www.sun.com/jobs">www.sun.com/jobs

Posted by Marc Hamilton on February 23, 2007 at 06:39 AM PST #

...I don't suppose someone from the ranks of Sun's biggest customers would count?

Posted by UX-admin on February 23, 2007 at 10:30 AM PST #

...Hmmm yeah, all the positions "here" are sales or pre-sales positions. Absolutely 0 corporate IT employment opportunities and 0 kernel development positions.

Posted by UX-admin on February 23, 2007 at 10:34 AM PST #

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