Sun's 2009 Agenda for Cloud Computing

It's not that Sun suddenly decided to enter the cloud. It had introduced Grid Computing Utility service with lots of fanfare, but had transitioned the services in October 2008. In fact, Dave Douglas (SVP, Cloud Computing) had acknowledged some of the cloud computing offerings had not gone as planned. Sun had tested the cloud computing waters and had offered the service much before Amazon and others.
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With excellent technologies like Solaris, MySQL, virtualization and the recently acquired Q-layer, Sun has repacked its utility computing offerings, said T.R. Madan Mohan, managing partner at Browne and Mohan. "With Debian founder and Opensolaris architect Murdock strategizing the offering, expectations were high. The offerings surely score high compared to several competitive offerings."

He said that HPC adoption is likely to be high on Sun's agenda for cloud computing because amongst all the verticals to grow in FY09, government (including defense) would spend a lot on infrastructure and advanced projects. Education and healthcare, which are recession-proof sectors, are expected to spend lot more on IT. "HPC adoption in these key verticals has been growing at 8% YOY worldwide and hence it is key focus."

It should also be worth noting that Sun traditionally has a larger share of the mindshare in these key verticals, Mohan said.

Alternately, the company could be positioning itself to tap the yet-untapped potential of the small enterprises.

According to Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst at Gartner, once Sun starts offering the service, the entire delivery model would change. "Although it will continue to offer technologies and solutions in the storage and server space, the changed delivery model will alter its equation with the SEs. This will enable Sun to approach those enterprises for whom it was too large a company to deal with."

And for that Sun may position itself as a large enterprise service company for small enterprises. IBM and HP could not cater to the needs of the SE. "No amount of fine tuning their products helped them. For the SE these companies are still very big, and out of reach. Salesforce lapped the opportunity and has groomed into a fine-hosting company," he said.

"I think it's like endorsing the cloud computing club. Oracle is the only company to say that there is no money on clouds, but there are also rumors that it might acquire salesforce.com. Sun also spotted the same opportunity, which other bigger companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Citrix and IBM are exploring. This is also a paradigm shift in delivery of computing from the server kind of model to a net kind of model," Chakraborti said.

He said Sun may position itself as a large enterprise service for small business (less than 250 people). "Since the model will be fee-based (may be pay-as-you-use), it will get a lot of traction. Payment terms of most companies are changing. The license-based model is dying a slow death. Windows is the last to work on license, and even that is changing. Microsoft identified that license is no longer valid."

And what kind of small businesses will Sun target? "Essentially, travel and tourism, hotels and small resorts, small BPOs and service companies, logistics companies, etc. where Sun can assure people that both the personal and the corporate structures would work for the cloud," Chakraborti said.

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BY Sonal Desai
Source：CXOtoday.com

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