Sun obscured by The Cloud

With all the hype in the cloud and the clear necessity for big software vendors to stake their claim I would have thought Sun would have announced/done something already. As my partner-in-crime Ross Mason points out in this post, they did: network.com--which is basically Grid computing and is shockingly dated in just a few years.

I wrote previously that "Java-in-the-cloud" will lead us to "Platform-as-a-Service" and as I continue to think about it, Sun has more of the pieces than any other BigCo--the right of hardware, operating system (Solaris) and development environment (Java) than does HP, IBM, or Microsoft. And don't forget that they also have MySQL and a huge development community.

I wonder why Sun hasn't figured this out and why there isn't already a "Java-in-the-Cloud" distribution that has the functionality of Java with some level of restrictions or other permission management geared toward SaaS.

Wouldn't it make sense to take the fact that Java is now open source and direct some energy toward making a cloud distribution? Or at least couldn't Sun come up with a Cloud infrastructure that doesn't look like crazy zeros and ones (or tables and rows) but instead gives the deep functionality of Java with the abstraction that defines modern service-oriented architectures?

[podollb]

Didn't Sun have something like Jini and JavaSpaces that had the looks of this type of thing?

[daverosenberg]

Maybe projectcaroline.net is what you are thinking of?

[flixvis]

Sun has not come out with a cloud computing offering as far as I know. I am sure we would have heard loud and clear if they did. Their Sun Grid offering is simply hpc utility computing on-demand and I never heard that this is their 'cloud' offering...

[flixvis]

Sun has not come out with a cloud computing offering as far as I know. I am sure we would have heard loud and clear if they did. Their Sun Grid offering is simply hpc utility computing on-demand and I never heard that this is their 'cloud' offering...