IBM in talks to buy SUN

Well not two days after I say how their cloud innovations may be too late in coming for SUN... now IBM is in talks to purchase them. How very interesting.

This potential deal is interesting on multiple fronts.

• RISC (Not Risk as in risky but RISC as in Reduced Instruction Set Computer) This potential merger creates a big home for the remaining non-Intel chip guys. While HP does have their own this combination of fanatical Sun worshipers and the IBM "tried and true"ers is a potentially strong combo. Very different audiences and users though with one driven by tech innovation in Sun users and the other in the "never been fired for picking IBM" mentality.
• Java - Not a lot of the press on the topic brought this up. I guess because it is a shared standard and all that rigmarole. The reality though is that Sun still drives Java in a lot of ways. IBM on the other hand has been a big Java pusher on multiple fronts for development tools, open source etc. This could be a big deal. Of course there is always the gotcha side of the new languages such as SCALA coming up in popularity for the many-core problem.
• Open Source - Sun was big big in the .com era and went down when the .com boom went up. Since then they pushed into Open Source fairly successfully and actually have several software products that they are responsible for that have decent success. Grid, MySQL, even Solaris (a religion among some by itself) are big software assets. Of course the hard part is that IBM has their own efforts in these areas.
• People Logistics - If Sun has an office somewhere, so does IBM. The overhead portion of this could be a big savings opportunity. Not geeky though so I will stop there.
• Competition - Some of the press has stated this is a response to Cisco's entry into the data center space for servers. I doubt that but it does narrow down the big data center players. HP, IBM... ... well...

All told I think this could be good for Sun and IBM. If done right. (isn't that always the trick though... if it works everyone is a genius if it doesn't they were doomed from the get-go.) It gives me some hope for these products and companies for the future and in any case it will be fun to watch.

More cloud updates

Since my last post I have been sent a few and read a few other articles that I thought might be worthy of note related to what clouds are and why it is important.

Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos did an interview with Informationweek and discussed some of the efforts that SUN has going on. One of the biggest items of note in that article is the new Drizzle product coming out of the MySQL work. There are many articles and blog posts on the topic as well but the gist is that it is an effort to Cloud-smarten MySQL. Seeing how "MySQL gets used, people only use a subset of the relational capabilities because it has a horizontal scale and there are all these concerns that go into large-scale deployments. So Drizzle sort of strips back down to a small core and then builds up the distributed capabilities." I have made no secret of my feeling that Data is no longer relational. So I think this is encouraging news though as seems to be the case lately with SUN it may be too late for MySQL.

(Aside... Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas recently co-authored Citizen Engineer: A handbook for socially responsible engineering. Though it is not yet available you can check out an interview with David Douglas on the book and engineering at the Mercury News. Personally I find this to be a refreshing take on the responsibility of Engineering as a profession and all of the personal and corporate responsibility that should go along with it.)

As if they noticed Microsoft pushing cloud tech Amazon announced a few new items in their own cloud initiatives. The ability to reserve capacity for known needs. They also expanded the ability of Windows based services in another Amazon zone. All of this from a company that sells stuff, proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Even Microsoft realizes it’s all about the cloud. (though opinions still differ on what a cloud exactly is… I personally like the blind men describing the elephant/cloud analogy)

Wired did an interview with Ray Ozzie - Long article but worth reading even if you are an ABM coalition member. (I have always thought highly of Ray Ozzie, even if I did hate Notes itself as an administrator and user, it was visionary in its setup and ahead of its time. Heck… Ray even saw P2P coming before the rest of the industry started to catch up.)

Further proof of the gap between the over-served and the under-served. The question is if Microsoft is late enough to the cloud innovation game that their delay will actually cause them harm in market share. They have rallied before and come in with overwhelming response. (e.g. I.E.) The truth is the services such as PPT, DOC etc is so ubiquitous in the work environment it will be difficult to displace them with anything else. The question though becomes more of what will happen to those types of documents and will they be service disassembled themselves enabling other innovation plugs to go in. Also, who knows maybe Microsoft will have the bones to push further change into media distribution and synch. Though Apple has a pretty strong hold and the media providers can’t seem to understand that technology can help versus hurt their business (self destroying DVRs anyone? Eventually a multi-billion dollar DVD business… sigh)

What a great time to be a technologist.