SUN-IBM Talks Breakdown

As reported in multiple sources today, including Reuters, Sun has apparently rejected a purchase offer by IBM.

"Shares of Sun Microsystems Inc tumbled 22.5 percent after it rejected a $7 billion buyout bid from IBM, leaving the smaller server and software maker vulnerable to lawsuits from shareholders nervous about its viability as a stand-alone company."

Part of the precipitous drop in share price was the realization that IBM-SUN threat to Microsoft dominance may no longer be a possibility.

(from Digital Journal)

"But the Sun cloud computing announcement also coincides with IBM's virtual desktop strategy that they brought to market late in 2008, bundling Lotus and other services to effectively strike at Microsoft. The IBM strategy, as reported in eWeek, would not only threaten Microsoft's desktop software, but delivers what many in the hardware manufacturing space have feared - cloud computing for the corporate enterprise IT market."

Since Sun probably needs an acquisition more than IBM, this was quite an interesting move.

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Sun Acquires Q-Layer

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced their acquisition of Q-layer. This Belgium based company automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. In the press release, David Douglas, SUN's SVP of Cloud Computing said “Q-layer's technology and expertise will enhance Sun’s offerings, simplifying cloud management and speeding application deployment.”

In last month's cloud computing update, Mr. Douglas outlined Sun's cloud plans so I'm expecting quite a bit from them in the next couple of months. The slides from this chalk talk are available in my slidespace.

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Sun Cloud Czar

Earlier this week it was announced that, Sun, Senior Vice President, Dave Douglas, was appointed to lead the Company's cloud computing efforts. A JDJ Article also stated that, in addition to becoming Sun's Cloud Czar, he will also lead Sun's efforts to capitalize on Network.com, the NetBeans developer platform, and the StarOffice portfolio. The unit will build upon Sun's existing online developer community to establish the company as a leader in cloud computing.

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World Summit of Cloud Computing: "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group

To leverage attendees of the World Summit of Cloud Computing, a kick-off meeting of the "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group will be held near Tel Aviv, Israel on December 3, 2008. The stated goal of this meeting will be to exchange information about best practices, use cases, standardizations, success stories, emerging technologies, and issues in Enterprise Cloud Computing.

This clearly is a grass roots attempt towards creating a framework to facilitate the future global movement towards Cloud Computing. As put by Avner Algom of the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies:

"The rapid growth of this technology will require a trusted source of objective information to enable enterprises to understand the opportunities and risks in this area. An Enterprise Cloud Computing Group can play this role and provide value to both vendors and customers."

Bob Marcus of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium is supporting this effort by providing questions on key issues from many enterprise and government representatives. According to Mr. Marcus, current areas of interest to NCOIC members include:

• Security of applications and data in public Clouds
• Availability, risk management, and SLAs for public Clouds
• Interoperability between public Clouds and enterprise systems
• Management and governance of services across public Clouds and the enterprise
• Best practices for migrating appropriate applications to Cloud environments
• Use cases and patterns for Cloud deployments

According to Mr. Algom, he has already receive intent interest from many groups. So far, he is expecting participation from the following organizations:

• 451 Group
• Forrester
• BMC Software
• Sun
• Amazon
• IBM
• Cohesiveft

By the way, the summit has collected quite an impressive list of speakers, including:

• Cristophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer, Google
• Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay
• Simone Brunozzi, Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
• Dr. Owen O'Malley, Hadoop Architect and Apache VP for Hadoop, Yahoo
• Charles Brett, Principal Analyst, Forrester
• Nati Shalom, Founder & CTO, GigaSpaces
• Peter Nickolov, President, COO and CTO, 3Tera
• Russ Daniels, Vice-President & CTOHP Cloud Services Strategy, HP
• Jon Mountjoy, Developer Relations Manager , Salesforce.com
• Richard Zippel, Vice President of Technology in the Chief Technologist's Office, Sun Microsystems

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Cloud Computing: A pay-by-consumption scalable service

John Edwards (not the Senator) of Computerworld sees cloud computing as a "...pay-by-consumption scalable service that's usually free of long-term contracts and is typically application- and operating system-independent". His recent article discusses AT&T, 3Tera, Google, IBM, Sun, Terremark Worldwide, XCalibre and Amazon.

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Sun Federal Cloud Computing eBook

Sun Federal now has it's ebook on cloud computing available for all. The website doesn't really offer any new information, but it does highlight how Sun Federal is targeting the government market with it's cloud offering.

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Now in the ring Sun/Amazon! - May 04, 2008

The Sun/Amazon cloud may be announced soon. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz delivered a short keynote at Startup Camp in San Francisco, an adjunct event to the JavaOne Conference. According to Om Malik at "buzzya", he let on to some interesting cloud computing news coming out later this week.

Important Article on Cloud Computing and Jeff Bezos from Amazon

More on the Sun Cloud, know as "Project Hydrazine"

"Project Hydrazine is slated to deliver immersive, creative experiences in the cloud via services. Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun, told me that a storage service, similar to Amazon's S3, would be available later this year. The company is also working on tools to make it easier for developers, as well as consumers, to mash up applications.

Sun CTO Robert Brewin described the emergent Project Hydrazine as a combination of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Live Mesh and Google Analytics."

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