Where: Cafe Urbano, IFSC, Dublin – Tuesday, 4th November, 7:30am-ish

We do evening events regularly but we want to offer more. We want to run a smaller event at the other end of the day for Digital people who can’t make it in the evenings.

The theme of the event is open for now but there will be a Q&A about the progress of the network project and the Digital Media Forum and I’d love your suggestions ideas and inputs for future events and initiatives.

We will be running another breakfast in Dublin for Enterprise week on Friday 21st on the theme of “Funding in a tightening economy” more details to follow on that one.

The format will initially be relatively free flowing with some networking and informal discussions. That’s not fixed though so we’re open to the idea of this becoming seminar based or otherwise. We’d love your input into what type of event this eventually becomes. So come along and add your views.

Coffee and pastries will be provided and some good networking to boot. See you there…

Please leave a comment below if you’re coming. (Gives us an idea of numbers)

Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials program has run for some time in the US and more recently, in 2007, it kicked off in Europe. The program is aimed at helping Startups get going and then to help them scale their activities as they grow in a cost effective way. I ran into Sun Startup Essentials EMEA head Stewart Townsend recently at the FOWA conference and here’s what he had to say about the program and their reasons for targeting Ireland as one of the first places to come to as they spread the program across Europe.

AM (Anton Mannering): Hi Stewart you run Sun’s Startup Essentials program in the EMEA region. How long has Startup Essentials been going elsewhere?

ST (Stewart Townsend): Globally it was launched in November 2006 in the US and came to Europe on December 5th 2007.

AM: Who that we’d know has been a client? Give me a few examples..

ST: People like Last.fm, Glasses Direct and fav.ot.it are just some of the services people might know that are Sun Startup Essentials clients.

AM: What problems do you help solve or alleviate for startups?

ST: Discount hardware down to a startup price, so that they can gain access to Enterprise class engineered servers at startup prices, with a global support practice, thus you can ring up, if there is a problem and talk to an engineer. (Here’s Fav.or.it CEO Nick Halstead talking about his experience with Sun and the support they’ve given him)

We also give startups who require hosting, access to discounted hosting for cloud computing, colocation, dedicated and managed hosting, making it easy to scale from Day 1, and we’ll continue talking to them about how to scale their company. (Stewart lists what they offer, I’ve listed it here so you can read it easily)

• FREE technical support, ask a Sun engineer questions on MySQL, Glassfish, and get an answer, to your problem
• Introductions to investors and capital houses.
• Discounts on the latest events…..
• Community hosting offers – FREE hosting for FB, MySpace, Opensocial

Each startup is different so I try to offer as much as I can then tailor where required, if someone wants to grow their business or a channel, I can introduce them to our sales team or channel to market.

AM: Why are you getting into the irish ecosystem now?

ST: We have been running the programme in the UK, France, Germany and Israel for 8 months to trial it, and make certain we have the right offering for the market, now we have all in place,then we are growing out across EMEA over the next two months, and I made certain that Ireland was on the first growth output, as it has such a hot vibrant startup community, that Ive wanted to help and support for such a long time

AM: What is Suns philosophy on this? What are you trying to achieve?

ST: In terms of Startup Essentials, we want to help support the community at large and give them access to our Open Source stack and Enterprise class offerings, so that when they grow and scale, they are prepared for it, and have an infrastructure in place that will mean they wont fail, whilst also by introducing them to our large startup network they can grow as a business as well, and thus benefit not just technically but commercially as well.

AM: And do you have any specific goals for the program in Ireland?

ST: Help grow and support as many startups as possible.

AM: Will there be some sort of official Launch in Ireland? When will it be?

ST: The programme is live in Ireland now at http://ie.sun.com/startupessentials/. We just need to organise a launch event or activity to officially wet the babies head.

AM: Well we’ll see if we can give you a hand with that…

END

So the program is live now in Ireland and it’s free to sign up. It’s definitely worth checking out as their definitely seem to be some great benefits to the program as described here. I’ll certainly be keeping a keen eye on the developments here and I’d love your feedback on any wins and losses.