The music is stopping and more or less the last of the big IT players have now developed or bought cloud computing services. Sun has announced this week that it is purchasing Belgium company QLayer. While Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have gone rapidly into Cloud services, Sun Microsystems have been conspicuous by their absence in the cloud scene over the last 12 months. Now we know why, as they’ve been on the buy rather than build path.
Interestingly, this direction for Sun won’t set them on a path to square up against Google, Amazon and Microsoft but rather see them develop a tool chain and service that will focus more on the management of cloud services with more of a focus on private clouds. This ground is relatively fallow in the Cloud Computing world as most of the focus has been on commodifying services for the the Internet - a la EC2 and AppEngine.
This approach by Sun will allow corporate data centres to use virtualisation to reconfigure system resources as required. This is important for large, geographically spread out businesses, with changing patterns of usage as different business units and regions go on and off line while minimising the level of investment in physical hardware and keeping things more secure than on a public cloud.
If we thought 2008 was the year of the cloud (not least after Werner Vogels - Amazon’s CTO - won Information Week’s Chief of the Year award) we probably haven’t even started yet with more players and services popping up and planned into 2009 and 2010.