Sun Microsystems India and NetMagic, one of India's leading managed IT services provider, have announced a strategic alliance to help start-ups in India and provide them access to Sun's technologies and services from Sun and NetMagic. As per the alliance, NetMagic will be Sun's hosting partner to provide Web-hosting and managed services to Sun's customers in their Start-up Essentials (SSE) programme. The alliance marks the first ever-local partnership for the SSE programme in India to offer Web-hosting services to Sun's customers in the country.

The SSE programme was launched in the United States in November 2006 and over 2,500 companies are part of the programme today. Sun extended the programme to India due to the rapid growth in numbers of developers and start-ups in this region in August 2007. The SSE programme also offers start-ups the ability to subscribe to Web-hosting services through NetMagic's technologies from Sun partners at deeply discounted rates thus freeing them of the hassle of maintaining their own data centres.

This alliance gives Sun Microsystems' SSE programme customers access to reliable and flexible hosting solutions from NetMagic powered by Sun technologies, software and services hosted at NetMagic's data centres and backed by expert advice from Sun on pressing technical questions.

Commenting on the venture with NetMagic, K P Unnikrishnan, director – Marketing, Alliance and Teleweb Sales, Sun Microsystems India, said, "When we launched the SSE program in India, we were offering Web-hosting services through two US-based companies. As our programme grew manifold, the feedback we received from the market was to also have a local Web-hosting provider and offer more choice to our customers. In NetMagic, we found a perfect fit as over the years NetMagic has established a good mind share within the start-up community in India. This partnership will continue to ensure that our customers have access to superior technology".

Kishore Badami, VP- Global Marketing, Netmagic Solutions, said, "Web-hosting has become an essential component of any web application today. We are extremely happy to have been selected by Sun Microsystems for providing hosting services to their customers. Sun's servers, Solaris operating system and virtualisation technologies, available at significantly discounted prices, help to reduce the cost of Web-hosting for start-up companies while providing them the infrastructure to build scalable, reliable, high-performance, and secure solutions to support and grow their new business."