Lately, the big question looming over cloud computing is whether it'll be sufficiently reliable for the enterprise market anytime soon. Google's recent downtime with Gmail followed by Microsoft Azure's 22 hour outage only served to highlight the potential reliability problems.
The silver lining on the cloud computing horizon came this past week in the form of Cisco, IBM and Sun Microsystems. First, Cisco unveils its Unified Computing System - a strategic initiative to bring together computing, network, storage and virtualization under a single architecture. Not to be outdone, Sun Microsystems introduced its Open Cloud Platform to challenge Amazon's EC2. All this happened amidst IBM's proposed acquisition of Sun which is all about buying IBM a cloud computing platform.
These traditional enterprise technology vendors could be criticized for being a little late to the cloud computing party. But make no mistake about it - their entrance is absolutely critical for cloud computing to make headway as a viable enterprise ready offering. IBM's acquisition of Sun, assuming it passes antitrust scrutiny will be a watershed event for cloud computing. It's one thing for Amazon to pitch EC2 as a cloud service to a Fortune 500 company, it's another thing for IBM to do so. IBM has the channel, credibility most importantly, the experience to deliver cloud based services to the large enterprise market. No other company currently in the cloud computing arena comes close - not Amazon, Microsoft or even Google.
Stay tuned - it could get interesting.
Do you agree? What are your thoughts about how the IBM-Sun deal might change the cloud computing landscape? Who are the big losers if this deal goes through?
Leave a comment