Sun appoints new MD for A/NZ

Duncan Bennet will take the position of vice president and managing director A/NZ for Sun Microsystems, and has already held the role for a three month preliminary period. He will be responsible for the overall growth strategy of the company in this region.

“For me, it’s a fascinating time to be at Sun. We have the strongest ever product and services portfolio, which means we can now support a much wider range of customers and partners – from the large enterprise to the small business,” he said.

Looking ahead, Bennet anticipates a buoyant year for Sun Microsystems as the market increasingly presents avenues for growth.

“Sun today is so much more exciting than even during the days of the dot.com boom, therefore making the ANZ leadership role very, very attractive to me,” he said.

Recent agreements with Acer and joint initiatives with Intel indicate Sun is driving growth through its partner community to expand focus into the entry-level market. An area of particular interest is the integration of MySQL – the open source database – to provide greater choice for open source applications, claimed Bennet.

“As the largest contributor to the open source movement, Sun is committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL's success - to first invest in communities of users and developers and then create commercial services without customer lock in,” he said. “With more multi-national companies developing software in-house and then open sourcing them the trust and uptake in open source applications will continue to grow.”

Prior to his current role, Bennet held a number of positions at Sun including director of sales and managing director of Sun's software joint venture with Netscape named iPlanet. He has over 30 years experience in the IT industry and has been involved in several start-ups for US-based companies including Pyramid Technology, Prime Computer and Forte Software.