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July 31, 2008 1:56 PM PDT

Sun finally creating a cloud-computing business

by Dave Rosenberg

Gavin Clarke reports that Sun's nascent cloud/grid/whatever effort is being turned into a separate cloud business unit lead by Sun's chief sustainability officer, Dave Douglas.

Sun sort of had something with Project Caroline and they were early on the utility-computing bandwagon, but considering the massive dossier of software, hardware, and storage the company lays claim to, one would expect a lot more. In fact, I would argue that of all the BigCo vendors, Sun has the best chance of becoming a meaningful cloud vendor.

I do have to ask why Sun announced (leaked?) this today--just days after the joint initiative from HP, et al. and not at JavaOne just a few months ago. Despite my enthusiasm for Sun's efforts (which I really hope to do well), this is the typically weak marketing the company gets beat up for.

I've lamented the fact that Sun was missing the boat (blimp?) on the cloud for several months and have had zero discussion with anyone there about it. I've even gone as far as to say that we can't have platform-as-a-service without Java in the cloud.

Maybe someone will start reaching out to interested parties?

Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom.
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by reneugarte August 1, 2008 12:12 AM PDT
Jonathan Schwartz made reference to their high-performance computing grid/cloud offering at Network.com during JavaOne, and so it would seem natural that they expand it to bring web-scale offerings to market along the lines of Amazon E2C, S3, etc. fairly soon.
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About Software, Interrupted

In "Software, Interrupted," Dave Rosenberg discusses disruption in the software market, as well as the products and services that keep business technology norms in perpetual flux.

With nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience spanning from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs, Dave co-founded open-source software company MuleSource and now serves as general manager of Hardy Way. He also happens to be a U.S. patent holder and a workaholic. Technology is his best friend and mortal enemy.

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