Sun Creates Education Service Provider program to guide vendors to portal distribution

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Dec, 1999

Sun Microsystems Inc. has announced the Sun Education Service Provider (EduSP) program to help vendors deliver web-based educational solutions to K-12 schools and higher education institutions. The program is a component of Sun's efforts to promote portal computing. Overwhelmed with current use of the "P" word? Sun defines the education portal as "an aggregation of content in a context sensitive way, a customization of applications for the educational community, and a personalization of services geared to individual users in this community." Sun's goal is to provide the infrastructure for either district enterprise portals, open portals on the web or web-based subscription portals.

Service providers eligible for the program include application service providers, content companies, information technology providers (such as course-building software vendors), independent software vendors, portal providers and Internet service providers. A company must have a registered .com or .net domain name to participate. Initial participants in the program include Campus Pipeline, LearningStation.com, iMind, TimeCruiser, the Wharton School of Business, and Verilogix.

Benefits of joining and committing to the architecture include numerous business and marketing services. Sun provides programs to ensure that a participant's revenue and operational goals are identified with a clear strategy for achieving them. A Sun education sales representative is assigned to each participant to help establish an EduSP business plan and hold quarterly reviews. The sales representative also works with participants to ensure that their presence in the market is closely coordinated with the momentum generated by related Sun marketing campaigns.

Additionally, Sun education business development specialists are available for "buddy sales" calls, and Sun provides sales presentation materials. Other programs help to ensure the technical proficiency of products and to provide training to participants' employees.

The EduSP is separate from the SchoolTone initiative started by Sun (see ISEM, July, 1999). SchoolTone is an industry initiative that is now managed separately from Sun. It is strictly a collective marketing effort to "bring together best-of-breed web-based educational content, portal technologies, applications, and services deployed through education service providers to K-12 schools." SchoolTone does not offer the extensive, individualized marketing or technical asitance of the EduSP program. Even so, the goals and participants are clearly closely related, and Shirish Netke heads both programs. He is Sun's strategic business development manager for service providers as well as the newly appointed chairman of the SchoolTone alliance. Unlike SchoolTone, there is no fee to participate in the EduSP program. Instead, Netke says participants do agree to something much like a purchasing contract. He expects rapid growth of EduSP participants.