Sun enters cloud computing to engage Microsoft head-on

In a broader "hydrazine plan," sun plans to leverage most of its core technologies to provide a full-featured solution that allows developers to use Sun's platform to create applications and services that can be leveraged to make money without going anywhere else.

Sun's senior engineer and chief technology officer for the software business, Bob Brewin, said in an interview on May 6 that the "hydrazine plan" includes a network environment, a data center and other infrastructure components, such as Sun's JavaFX Rich Internet application Technology, Sun's GlassFish Application server, Sun Enterprise Service Bus, Sun directory server, MySQL, "Cheap storage" and sun hardware.

There are also places to store services that run on the cloud, and to store metadata that is used repeatedly in the production application.

As part of the hydrazine program, Sun also launched the Insight program, Brewin said. This analytics feature lets developers know who is using their products and use this feature to inject advertising or make money.

Brewin explains that the cloud portion of the hydrazine program will be an "extensible container" that allows you to run applications like Amazon's EC2 and Google's application engine.

Some elements of the hydrazine plan seem to be very similar to Microsoft's recently released "Live Mesh" strategy. Microsoft's strategy includes cloud computing and a synchronization mechanism.

The "hydrazine plan" strategy will indeed enable Sun to compete directly with Microsoft in other areas, such as developers and design tools, especially in developer-designer workflows.

In answer to the question of whether Sun will enter the design tool field, Brewin replied, "We have to enter this field." This is the only way to achieve success. We're going to hire a lot of designers, not programmers. They will push the job. Sun is not able to launch a design tool like Photoshop, he says. Sun will learn to walk before running. Sun may not exit the design kit software, he said, but sun will work with existing vendors to provide that functionality.

Brewin says he personally thinks he prefers to work with companies like Adobe in the design field to launch the capabilities of these extended designers, rather than launching them on their own.

Brewin also said the "hydrazine plan" would also support other cloud computing, such as Google's app engine and Amazon's ECA. It will also support the services of companies such as ebay and PayPal.

Al Hilwa, IDC analyst, says a big battle is brewing in the area of a unified development platform for new equipment. The struggle will take a long time to quell. But the stakes in this struggle are great. The flexibility to provide rich content is a key competitive advantage in all future environments. Sun is still lagging behind Microsoft and Adobe in this regard. There are a lot of competitors in the mobile field, such as Apple, Google and Nokia. The launch of JavaFX will allow sun to enter the game, but it does not make sun a leading position.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)