Sun enters the cloud

The world’s largest open-source company, Sun Microsystems, has made its entrance to cloud computing in a massive open-source strategy of adoption, commercial innovation and efficiently connects the two opportunity.

“We believe that cloud computing is the next generation of network computing. It could be the experience of server, storage, networking and virtual technology provider, in the increasing movement of computer and data resources into the Web.”

What is the cloud?

“It’s a world where the network is the platform for all computing, where everything we think of as a computer today is just a device that connects to the big computer we’re building,” says Tim O’Reilly, CEO, of O’Reilly Media.

Cloud computing in terms of pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability and the elimination of hardware management can draw advantages to enterprises.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun recently described the cloud as “the next big revenue opportunity
Speaking at an Open Source expo, Schwartz explained that the cloud enables Sun to deliver value that scales to its open-source user based, the cloud is the key to turning users into customers.

“It delivers higher efficiency, massive scalability, and faster, easier software development. It’s about new programming models, new IT infrastructure, and the enabling of new business models.”

Meanwhile, analyst from Gartner projected Cloud computing’ will take off, thus untying applications from specific infrastructure, by 2011.” Particularly, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 percent of their IT infrastructure as a service.

Sun Microsystems cloud computing could also increase innovation and hardware utilization while lowering its cost in less time, as its approach is to deliver all the components that enterprises, developers, and end users need to build cloud environments.

To date, open-source Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Python are the preferred platform for building and deploying new Web applications and services, alongside with OpenSolaris, MySQL, and Java as the most business software growing in management and virtualization products.