Sun Microsystems’ Due Diligence policy and its Partner Information Questionnaire (PIQ) is a case of one bad apple does not spoil the whole batch.
CDN – Computer Dealer News has dealt with most of the Canadian based Sun partners for a long time and I can tell you they’re all upstanding citizens and terrific business partners. They all act professionally. Sure, they compete to win, but they’re not unscrupulous people.
This new policy comes from the U.S. and it was designed to prevent any sort of corruption. This means there must have been some corruption recently that has embarrassed Sun, and probably Oracle. I understand that Sun has to take care of things.
But asking long standing channel partners to divulge personal information is wrong. This is not how you treat partners,or people for that matter. And to imply to channel partners that “you better do it or else” is nothing short of school-yard bullying. Come on folks, we’re all grown up here!
A better way of handling this would have been to hold a town hall conference where Sun could inform channel partners of this Due Diligence policy and PIQ, field questions and report the feedback to its U.S. executives.
In my opinion, the Canadian team should have stood up to their U.S. counterparts and said “No!” They have the authority to nix Due Diligence and PIQ. They could have told the Americans this isn’t right for Canadian partners or it’s not fair to force quality partners to comply with this policy because of problems with foreign partners.
Sun Canada’s statement to CDN doesn’t properly answer all the questions that channel partners have. Here it is: “As part of this Program, a partner information questionnaire (PIQ) was distributed globally and has been completed by more than 2,000 Sun partners. Sun’s questionnaire was reviewed for global data privacy issues and is on par with questionnaires used by many other companies.”
This statement doesn’t address: Why Sun forced some partners to fill out PIQ, while others didn’t have to?How the information will be used? Where the information will be stored? How will it be protected? Why wasn’t this PIQ used for normal channel on-boarding processes? What sparked this program? Was it related to the possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act revealed by Sun in May? Why are partners so upset if this policy is widely used by other vendors?
But the most important question is why this program launched in the first place? What is Sun trying to accomplish?
All this has done is upset a great group of channel partners who are dealing with issues such as tightening IT budgets, staff shortages, a declining economy, margin pressure, the eventual transition to Oracle and many, many other things.
The channel is looking for some answers from Sun Canada. And, right now, it doesn’t seem they’ll get any.
