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Last week saw the 2nd Partner Marketing Academy (PMA) taking place in Sun's Offices - near Camberley, UK - an event targeted at our key marketing contacts and those people that own the Sun business within our partner community.  The event built on the success of the last PMA 6 months ago and in that time has gained tremendous momentum and credibility which was clear from the number of attendees which has almost doubled with 40 attendees at the Partner Dinner and over 90 attendees at the PMA. 

This is an important 6 monthly event for partners to hear Sun's strategies and plans.  Partner feedback from the last event and from a pre-event questionnaire was used to tailor the agenda to partners needs.  A highlight for me was the inclusion of 2 partner case studies, one from SCC, a long-standing directly managed partner and another from Latitude, a fairly new, smaller partner managed through Avnet.  Both presentations gave us enormous credibility and demonstrated how Sun adds value to partners and how partners add value to Sun and the result = success.

• Paul Flannery - challenged partners to explore and monetize "the art of the possible"
• Stefan Huwer and Paul Leonard - RDA, where to focus for opportunity and upside
• Jay Huff - architecture of the 'marketing supply chain' and how partners can take Sun initiatives to market. (Eco, Enterprise, Commercial HPC, Web Scale,Developers)
• Geoff Undrell - partner success story around volume and value campaigns - 'does a lot of work for charity'
• Garry Owen - When to use Try & Buy and when to use Sunseed, the mystery explained
• Eddie Partridge - partner success story taking Sun 'canned' programmes to market with the Latitude wrapper..... and how it pays to 'stalk' Sun marketing!
• Laurence James - Climatic change and the eco opportunity, from your friendly weather man
• Jim Craig - Virtualisation - the hot topic
• Will Trotman - Enterprise Computing 'Rules OK'