Sun boosts storage business to exploit market growth

Sun Microsystems plans to boost its sales and marketing activities in the data storage market to try and take advantage of growing demand fuelled by the rise of the Internet.

As part of the initiative, Sun has created a new storage sales line of business, promoted two executives, and promised to develop storage offerings that can be accessed by all types of systems.

Ed Zander, Sun's president, said: "We are living in a world where digital information is the lifeblood of commerce and community. As every person and digital device connects to the Internet, it will create enormous demand for our storage products and services. As a premiere platform provider for the Internet economy, we continue to invest heavily in our storage business."

As a result, the company has promoted Jeff Allen, former vice president of marketing of Sun's Network Storage unit, to become vice president of the new storage sales line of business. He will have sales, training and support staff from Sun's Enterprise Services and Computer Systems divisions reporting to him.

Allen's role is to carry out initiatives to boost network storage sales, service and support efforts. He will report directly to Janpieter Scheerder, Sun's Network Storage president, and Frank Pinto, the company's worldwide vice president of sales.

Denise Shiffman, who becomes vice president of marketing for Network Storage, will replace Allen. Shiffman, who has been at Sun for nine years in various management positions in its desktop and server groups, most recently served as director of content services.

But Sun also indicated that it would add Jiro support to all of its storage systems and management software over the coming year. Jiro is based on the Java 2 platform, and Sun claims it will eliminate existing interoperability problems between storage hardware and software and network devices.

At the same time, StorageNetworks, which provides storage services, announced that Sun's Scheerder had joined its Executive Advisory Council. The Council helps the firm's executives plan company strategy and gain access to potential partners and customers.

Scheerder becomes the eighth member of the Council, which includes Andreas Bechtolsheim, vice president of engineering of the Gigabit Switching Group at Cisco Systems.