Note to Cloud: Here comes the Sun

First of all, there was the Sun-sponsored CommunityOne conference in New York on St Patrick's Day, and there was green beer.  Enough said.

I awoke at 7:30 the following morning to see that Sun's stock had pretty much doubled overnight.  In a green-tinted haze, I marveled that this skyrocket performance came from their announcement of the Sun Cloud - the company's first public cloud service based on the Sun Open Cloud Platform.

Sure, Sun's cloud strategy is interesting - but, as it turns out, not nearly as interesting as rumors from the usual cadre of "reliable sources" that IBM will buy Sun for $6.5 billion.  For what it's worth, if there were a place to text my vote, I'd spend the 99 cents to say "go for it".  The largest-ever  acquisition for IBM, this move would certainly put the hurt on HP.

Back at the conference, David Douglas, who is both Senior Vice President of Cloud Computing and Chief Sustainability Officer, harkened back to the days when Sun (and IBM) were proclaiming "the network is the computer".  In this "4^th wave" of computing, he spoke for Sun declaring that "the cloud is the computer" now.  He was followed by Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing, who manned a fairly slick drag and drop demo creating a cloud of Web servers, App servers, MySQL, load balancers and WikiMedia Application.

Sun's vision of a world of many clouds - public and private - that are open and interoperable, of course starts with its Sun Open Cloud Platform, which brings together Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Open Storage.  The first two Sun Cloud services will be Sun Cloud Storage and Sun Cloud Compute, available sometime this summer.

Based on several apres-session conversations, I'd sum up their strategy for differentiating from, say ... Amazon? along these lines:

• Sun's cloud initiatives will be OS agnostic - Windows, Linux, Solaris
• Sun will leverage its installed base in the open source development community (Java, MySQL, and GlassFish are available on an open source model.)
• Sun has 7,000+ pairs of sales feet on the street in daily contact with enterprise accounts
• APIs tie back to the open source community (In fact, open source has been profitable for the company and is integral to its growth strategy.)

Sun Cloud, Amazon, Azure .... It's all good.  Enterprises like choice and they'll be looking for the quickest, most cost-effective ways to send their applications cloudward and beyond.  And we've never met a cloud we didn't like.