If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.
Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.
Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.
Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.
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Despite all the hype associated with a never-ending Linux versus Windows battle, it's Unix, and specifically Sun Solaris that has felt the most pressure in the server operating system landscape.
While I doubt that Solaris will completely languish long-term under Oracle's watchful eye (in fact, it may well flourish), there is little question that Sun's ups and downs in the recent past have made customers look to alternatives.
At a recent IBM analyst meeting, Inna Kuznetsova, director, Linux strategy, told attendees that the Linux business is strong and growing.
- In the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux.
- IBM doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009.
Much of the growth comes from IBM's close relationship with Red Hat, which allows IBM to play all sides of the fence in terms of OS suggestions to their customers.
This comes at a time when Novell has decided to invest further into OpenSUSE, adding full-time staff to the project team. As The Register noted, it's a bit shocking that it's taken this long for Novell to properly fund the effort, but it seems like an obvious time to take advantage of the market opportunity as Solaris and OpenSolaris are potentially on the ropes.
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Sun Microsystems shareholders have filed three separate class action lawsuits to block a $7.4 billion acquisition by Oracle, the company revealed in a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The lawsuits allege Sun's board didn't live up to its fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders when it accepted Oracle's acquisition offer, saying "the consideration offered in the proposed transaction is unfair and inadequate."
Personally, I don't think these issues will block the deal. If it really has to, Oracle has the cash to up its offer or settle with the shareholders before it gets nasty (if the suits actually have any merit). And in another wrinkle, Oracle probably already knows that Sun may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
That's right: Sun also disclosed Friday that it may have violated the act, which bars American companies from bribing or engaging in other unethical activity with foreign officials. This can often be difficult since some foreign governments, to put it charitably, don't have the same hard rules against government bribery. Potential contractors can be put in the no-win situation of either paying off local officials or losing out on a lucrative contract. That's not to say that's the situation Sun is facing. It's not clear what Sun executives believe may have happened, but they have hired outside lawyers to look into it.
But as I already said, I don't think these new revelations are deal-breakers, even if FCP violations can carry potential penalties that include fines, criminal sanctions, and a ban from doing business with the U.S. federal government.
What does this tell us about the Sun/Oracle deal itself?
Oracle execs must believe that they can work out a deal with the dissenting shareholders (or, again, maybe they think their suits have little merit). And Oracle execs probably aren't that worried about any lingering government-related issues. This isn't the first time Oracle's acquisitions have come with legal question marks. The database king successfully fought a government antitrust suit against the eventual takeover of software rival PeopleSoft several years ago. Many pundits thought fighting the suit was folly, but Oracle did it anyway.
... Read moreThe fact that SGI was acquired by Rackable Systems for the sad sum of $25 million was big news on Wednesday only because most people had forgotten that the company, formerly better known as Silicon Graphics, still existed.
So what killed SGI? In addition to the rise of Nvidia and makers of other graphics chips that ran on cheaper hardware, it was bad choices:
- Continuing to stick with its own chips, operating system, and hardware while the rest of the world moved to commodity x86 boxes.
- The adoption of Intel's Itanium chip, which remains a depressing joke of a product.
- A myopic view that the core market in high-end servers wasn't being decimated by the rise of Solaris and Linux
When I first started working at Bell Labs in 1995, most of the servers we used were from SGI. People liked the stability of Irix and the fact that the machines looked cool (ask anyone what they remember about SGI, and they will tell you the gear was cool.)
In 1996 or so, I started seeing mass quantities of Sun Microsystems' machines coming into Lucent, and by 1998, much of the company's operations ran on Solaris machines. Sun commoditized SGI much in the same way that cheap x86 Linux boxes have subsequently commoditized Sun.
Can Sun avoid the SGI trap? Maybe, but probably only if the company gets broken up into different business units that separate out the OS, software and hardware.
Sun has some good stuff. Solaris is great, the hardware is fine, if a bit expensive, and the company has good cash flow and products in better market segments than SGI did.
But Sun also has a lot of junk. There is a vast array of Sun software that costs a lot to maintain but doesn't deliver much revenue. This is arguably the area in which Sun's strategy has been so off the mark. With the exception of MySQL, there aren't many Sun software products that generate significant revenue. If software is crappy, and people don't want to use it, then it doesn't matter if it's open source or proprietary.
It sounds like a simple argument to suggest that x86 Linux killed SGI and is killing Sun, but the truth of the matter is that both companies could have made things significantly better for themselves by embracing Linux early on, instead of fighting the tide and waiting until their market position had been vanquished.
The other interesting aspect here is that Microsoft has proven to be the smartest of all, having realized that the decoupling of the operating system, hardware, and applications would eventually give it the ability to dominate multiple markets by owning the user platform.
Lucky break for all you Open Sources podcast fans--Matt Asay and I went to the Web 2.0 event Tuesday and instead of podcasting, we shot some video footage using the iSight camera on my Mac and a Flip Video camera. It won't win any videography awards, but it was great sitting next to each other to record this episode.
As I continue to nurse a hand injury, I am happy to say no one was hurt during the filming.
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In preparation for my upcoming OSBC session, "Open-Core Licensing: The New Business Model Standard for Commercial Software," I dug through some old presentations to try to figure out how monetization efforts have changed in commercial open-source companies.
Ultimately, revenue from open source boils down to understanding buyer types, as described by former MySQL CEO and current Sun Senior Vice President Marten Mickos starting all the way back in 2005.
Marten described the buyer market for open-source solutions as:
- Those who spend time to save money
- Those who spend money to save time
Marten has also asserted that "in the past, differentiation was a compelling reason to buy but, if incorrectly implemented, it could also drive the compelling reason to abandon."
That statement leads into the topic of discussion around open-core licensing and the associated risk-versus-reward scenario as open-source vendors manage projects to balance revenue and community.
The big challenge for vendors trying to monetize open-source products is how to encourage payment for something (anything?) while not bastardizing the user base that is hooked on the free software. I've outlined below my latest attempt at explaining the commercial open-source evolution--or at least, an explanation of how several companies have matured their models to ensure both community and financial success.
- Support + free code
- Support + commercial license
- Support + commercial license + indemnity + warranty
- Support + commercial license + indemnity + warranty + exclusive features
I read on Wednesday that Sun Microsystems plans to release open-source application programming interfaces for its soon-to-launch cloud services. The obvious question in my mind is, why wouldn't Sun just support Amazon's APIs, which have become the de facto standard?
The short answer is that Amazon filed a very broad patent titled "Distributed storage system with Web services client interface" related to its Simple Storage Service (S3), and it's not clear if the company will eventually take legal action against those using the APIs in their own products.
We can argue all day about the U.S. patent system being broken, but the point is that Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are locked into the platform, and if the patent is granted, users may well end up without an alternative.
Sun is absolutely doing the right thing in avoiding the risk of Amazon's patent attempt (though it's surprising that it couldn't do some kind of covenant deal) as well as creating true open cloud standards. But the Amazon APIs are the dominant force--in fact, the only real option for the cloud. Unless they become legitimate standards, cloud access will potentially end up in a morass of competing APIs and methods.
I can't see a reason why Amazon wouldn't take the step of making their APIs actual standards. Besides the goodwill, it would also mean that their own services would be accessible to every other system. For now, however, its patent application states the following:
United States Patent Application 20070156842
Distributed storage system with Web services client interfaceA distributed, Web services-based storage system. A system may include a Web services interface configured to receive, according to a Web services protocol, a given client request for access to a given data object, the request including a key value corresponding to the object.
The system may also include storage nodes configured to store replicas of the objects, where each replica is accessible via a respective unique locator value, and a keymap instance configured to store a respective keymap entry for each object.
For the given object, the respective keymap entry includes the key value and each locator value corresponding to replicas of the object. A coordinator may receive the given client request from the Web services interface, responsively access the keymap instance to identify locator values corresponding to the key value and, for a particular locator value, retrieve a corresponding replica from a corresponding storage node.
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Instead of our normal Open Sources podcast, Matt Asay and I decided to use Twitter (@daveofdoom and @mjasay) this morning to discuss the news surrounding the rumor that IBM is acquiring Sun.The full transcript is below for your enjoyment.
Note: the top post is the last one, so you need to read from the bottom up if you want the whole thread.
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daveofdoom: @mjasay This wraps-up our first Open Sources Twit-cast (I hate that I used that phrase). Thanks to @botchagalupe and @glynmoody -
cote: @botchagalupe @daveofdoom @mjasay you guys should put down the Twitter and record a podcast right now. Seriously. You can use my conf line. -
glynmoody: @daveofdoom interesting - daveofdoom: @mjasay @botchagalupe I don't see how it matters materially in next 3 years. But sooner or later it would have to be meaningful.
- daveofdoom: @glynmoody Amazon APIs are overwhelmingly the dominant force. Word is Sun got scared of patent threats from AWS so went with CC.
- mjasay: @daveofdoom @botchagalupe Will a Sun+IBM combo make any material difference to Microsoft's dominance in the next 3 years?
- botchagalupe: @daveofdoom Agree and disagree. They both have not really done anything yet. However, Qlayer and TSAM will have to be reconciled.
- mjasay: @daveofdoom I'm not sold on Sun's cloud strategy, but then, I'm not sold on anyone's
- botchagalupe: @daveofdoom @mjasay IBM is (IMHO) still bleeding from all the acquisitions over the last 5 yrs. Even IBM would have a hard time adding SUN
- daveofdoom: @botchagalupe Sun's got nothing meaningful in the cloud yet. Is this just a media frenzy to make the deal seem attractive?
- mjasay: @daveofdoom Mostly, I think this gives Jonathan a reason to stop hewing so hard to the "F" in FOSS.I know MySQL has had a positive influence
- daveofdoom: @mjasay What do you think about this Sun Cloud nonsense? Just cause they made an announcement, now they're a cloud provider?
- botchagalupe: @daveofdoom @mjasay of course after they put an IBM'r in charge...
- mjasay: @daveofdoom I would not want to be a Sun employee right now. Though @botchagalupe could be right, and IBM could leave them be for a bit
- botchagalupe: @daveofdoom @mjasay 1 of IBM's acquisition models is to leave the acquired comp alone for a few yrs. My bet is this one will go that way
- daveofdoom: @mjasay How much of Sun staff gets whacked in that deal? IBM is bloated but Sun is over-the-top.
- daveofdoom: @mjasay I think the culture clash is overblown. I bet Sun would be fine with Apache-style. Plus maybe they would stop CDDL.
- mjasay: @daveofdoom Do you think Sun's OSS fervor would have any impact on IBM's more buttoned-down, Apache-style approach to OSS?
- mjasay: @daveofdoom I think more BigCos will see OSS startups as a way to acquire new customers. Sun wasn't too far off w/ its "adoption" story
- mjasay: @daveofdoom re fewer BigCos to acquire OSS startups - yes,but I agree w/ @timoreilly that most will be bought by proprietary vendors, anyway
- daveofdoom: @mjasay Who buys all the Java-based OSS companies if Sun is gone? I don't see IBM doing it.
- daveofdoom: @mjasay I think IBM cares about MySQL. The rest of the software is not meaningful to them.
- daveofdoom: I think IBM cares about MySQL. The rest of the software isn't meaningful to IBM
- daveofdoom: @mjasay Without Sun, there is one less large company to acquire open source startups
- mjasay: @daveofdoom Do you think IBM even cares about Sun's open source assets?
- mjasay: @daveofdoom ...within Sun (MySQL, Java, etc.) would survive. Glassfish? No chance. OpenStorage? Could be a good loss leader for IBM
- mjasay: @daveofdoom I do think Sun+IBM has the potential to limit choice, but we're already well down that path. Real q is whether key OSS bits ...
There was a time when Java was the darling of the technology industry. It had everything going for it--technically advanced, relatively easy to use, and it held the magical promise of "write-once, run-anywhere."
But, over the last two years or so (seemingly ever since Sun changed it's stock ticker to JAVA), the language has become boring and moribund. Not that programming languages are such a thrill ride, but Java had a level of panache well beyond the norm.
Somehow Java has become really boring. People don't even argue about it anymore. Once thriving sites like TheServerSide don't have the excitement or vitriol that they did in the past. Based on some quick interviews I did, Java guys are all over the map as to why the excitement is gone, running the gamut from JSR bureaucracy, to the focus on things like JavaFX, to the changes in Java EE 6 that most developers didn't ask for and do nothing to support new paradigms like Web apps or cloud computing.
Sun has effectively lost the battle for the cloud to virtualization, which boggles the mind considering the enormous arsenal of servers, storage, and software that Sun has at its disposal to create a differentiated cloud offering for all of the enterprise Java shops. I remain of the opinion that Java should be the dominant platform for the cloud.
... Read moreThe more I read about Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz betting the company's future open source, the more I grow concerned that if it fails, Sun will be the harbinger of sorrow for the rest of the open source world.
Sun is arguably the most important open source vendor right now as Schwartz has bet the company on software instead of its traditional hardware revenue. (I'm not discounting Red Hat's place, just that RH has been on the open source path since the beginning.)
Sun's strategy is audacious and reshapes the way that everything is done, but it's not clear that the strategy is correct or that Sun's existing corporate structure can execute on this enormous change. Staff reductions and other cost-cutting measures have little if anything to do with the switch to open source. Those measures would need to be taken regardless as the company is simply too bloated and expensive to run even if it generates a decent amount of cash.
Sun's approach--at least the way I'm reading it from Jonathan Schwartz's statements, is about making the software totally free and trying to sell support and hardware. This clearly diminishes the value of the products and doesn't offer a mechanism that encourages people to pay for software. It also puts an unnecessary burden on the notion of open source--such that if Sun is wrong, everyone else will look wrong too. But, Sun's approach is quite different from most (all?) of the open source start-ups and also different from Red Hat, the obvious leader.
The most successful open source companies have figured out ways to encourage people to pay for software. This usually includes a commercial license that removes the open source license restrictions. Typically, we see the base "open core" product plus some type of value added feature or service set that can't be obtained for the community version. The idea of simply selling support fell by the wayside for most companies at least one year ago.
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