“All too often, insider analyst research and commentary is costly, inaccessible or ineffective to the entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who need timely insights most. We’re changing this by making high-quality expert reports, data and commentary easy to access and highly interactive for our community in key emerging technology areas.”

I was therefore delighted when VP of Research Michael Wolf got in touch before Christmas to ask if I’d be interested in providing them with content.

My first piece, which is published today, explores some of the issues faced by Cloud service providers and users in negotiating the attitudes and laws of the different jurisdictions through which their data may pass. I would welcome any comments on the piece, and must thank Microsoft‘s Matt Deacon, Sun Microsystems‘ Michelle Dennedy, IBM‘s Harriet Pearson, Rackspace‘s Simon Abrahams, Computacenter‘s Matthew Yeager and F5 Networks‘ Lori MacVittie for taking the time to talk with me as I prepared it. Thanks, also, to Celeste LeCompte at GigaOM for editing and for Americaniszing my spellingz… Any misunderstandings, misrepresentations, typos etc, are of course my own.

I look forward to my next GigaOM assignment!

For those on this side of the Atlantic with a particular interest in the topic, London’s Powered By Cloud event (where I participated in a panel last year) is back for a second edition on 8 and 9 February. Of particular interest in this context is an addition to this year’s event; 10 February’s dedicated to a Cloud Law Summit.

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Sun Microsystems used the CommunityOne East event in New York City this past March to unveil their Cloud Computing offering. I spoke with the company’s Juan Carlos Soto recently, to learn more.

Today, David Douglas (Senior VP, Cloud Computing) opened CommunityOne West in San Francisco discussing ‘Communities, Open Source Platforms, and Clouds.’ I joined the live webcast to see what he had to say.

Dave Douglas kicks off, talking to the importance of ‘community’. He stresses the underlying value of open – source code, protocols, formats, ideas.

“‘Open’ lowers barriers to adoption and innovation.”

A lot of the ideas he’s highlighting are similar to Tim O’Reilly’s call to ‘do stuff that matters;’ but oddly Dave doesn’t mention this.

Lew Tucker, Sun’s Cloud CTO, gets up on stage to talk about Sun’s Cloud Computing with Dave. Their opening gambit is around the on-demand nature of the Cloud, with its ability to pull up (and shut down) Cloud resources on demand, with a credit card. Lew argues that the Cloud doesn’t create lock-in, as it’s based upon open software such as Apache, Solaris and Linux.

Sun’s Storage Service, announced in March, is still on track to be available this summer… so no surprise unveiling from the stage today.

Lew shows some demonstrations of the Sun Compute and Storage Services, building upon those we saw in March to manage resources in the data centre via GUI.

Dave mentioned that ‘several thousand’ Sun staff currently use the Sun Cloud internally, every day, “in Open Office” and elsewhere. Is this ‘just’ Cloud-based file storage, or something more?

On an intriguing mix of laptops, other examples from Sun Partners include Vertica and webappVM. The examples definitely leaned towards the sysadmin and developer crowd, and I look forward to seeing some user-facing apps down the line. Dave cites ‘dozens and dozens’ of partners, as their logos flash up on screen behind him.

Lew suggests that the Cloud introduces a change from ‘Download -> Install -> Config’ to ‘Deploy,’ with the implication that this will always be easier.

Turning to Security, Lew points to a new ‘secure hardened VM for OpenSolaris,’ available on Amazon S3 today. The Center for Internet Security has assessed this new VM and verified it as secure.

Eric Baldeschwieler from Yahoo! gets up on stage, to talk about the ways in which Apache Hadoop is being used at Yahoo! – and their use of the Sun Cloud.

I look forward to hearing more, face to face, during June’s Semantic Technology and Cloud Computing tour around Silicon Valley; Menlo Park is already on my itinerary, along with sojourns to San Jose, San Francisco and Sunnyvale. Anyone else got things they want to show me, June 14-21?

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“EUCALYPTUS — Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems — is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing Elastic/Utility/Cloud computing using computing clusters and/or workstation farms. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is interface-compatible with Amazon.com’s EC2 (arguably the most commercially successful Cloud computing service), but the infrastructure is designed to be modified and extended so that multiple client-side interfaces can be supported. In addition, EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic web service technology making it easy to install and maintain.”

Since then, we’ve seen EUCALYPTUS embraced by Sun Microsystems in their Cloud announcements and potentially downloaded to millions of machines around the world as part of the latest update to Linux’s popular Ubuntu distribution.

Today the UCSB research project takes the next step, announcing a successful Series A investment round led by Benchmark Capital that moves the team out of the University and onto a professional footing with $5.5 Million to spend. Project Director Wolski becomes CTO, with Woody Rollins as CEO and Matt Reid as VP Sales & Marketing rounding out Eucalyptus Systems‘ fledgling management team. Wolski reports that the entire UCSB development team is moving across to the newly capitalised company, which is licensing IP from UCSB in return for an undisclosed equity stake. Benchmark’s Kevin Harvey takes a seat on the Board, which is Chaired by former AOL Europe CEO Andreas Von Blottnitz.

Wolski is quick to stress that Eucalyptus Systems is an open source company; there is no intention to start charging for software that is freely available for download today, and this will be actively maintained and developed moving forward. A point release is expected ‘in about a week’ to resolve minor issues with respect to Ubuntu 9.04, and version 1.6 of Eucalyptus will follow ‘in 6-8 weeks.’

Speaking of the company’s proposition to new customers, Wolski suggests that

“Eucalyptus Systems will enable businesses of any size to leverage their own IT resources to get the benefits of cloud computing without the concerns of lock-in, security ambiguity, and unexpected storage costs that can be associated with public clouds.”

Interestingly, Wolski describes the revenue model traditionally employed by companies seeking to make money from open source as no more than a way of boot-strapping Eucalyptus Systems toward their real goal. Rather than simply concentrating on the provision of for-profit support and consultancy, Wolski has his sights set on the sale of new Eucalyptus-powered software solutions directly addressed to Enterprise customers. It’s not yet clear whether these solutions will be SaaS offerings or for on-premise installation, but Wolski is confident that the company’s early customers will begin to receive their new software during the third quarter of 2009.

Although best known for providing an on-premise equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Wolski stresses that the Eucalyptus architecture is API agnostic and could be extended to emulate other Cloud solutions relatively easily. This, allied with Eucalyptus’ industry-leading support for both the KVM and Xen hypervisors, raises the prospect of enterprise customers integrating their own (Eucalyptus powered) internal Cloud with different public Clouds, seamlessly and at will.

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Much has changed since then and we now know, for example, that Oracle has supplanted IBM as suitor for the Santa Clara company.

Amidst the distractions of a market obsessed with the next twist in the ongoing acquisition saga, Sun appears as committed as ever to delivering on their vision for Cloud Computing, and I recently spoke with Juan Carlos Soto to learn more about the company’s plans. Juan Carlos is currently Vice President for Cloud Computing Marketing at Sun Microsystems, and has held a number of technical and business positions in more than ten years with Sun.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

Initially pitched straight at the utility computing needs of Web startups, Sun has far broader enterprise ambitions for a Cloud Computing offer that plays as well with Fortune 500′s CIOs as with dorm-room startups. An initial RESTful API is already available, and Soto reports that the company remains on track to roll out public services in the next few months.

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Most readers of this blog are probably well aware that a new version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution is coming this week, and that it will be putting code from the Open Source EUCALYPTUS Project to work in simplifying the creation of private Clouds that look remarkably like Amazon’s EC2. You’ve probably also read RightScale‘s announcements with respect to Ubuntu, and heard that Sun Microsystems were also making supportive noises about EUCALYPTUS and the EC2 API before their recent change in circumstances.

Earlier today I spoke with Simon Wardley of Canonical (the commercial organisation that sells support and consultancy for Ubuntu) to hear a little more about what those downloading Ubuntu will get… and what it might mean for the rapidly shifting Cloud landscape.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes are available on their Nodalities blog.

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Twitter is aflutter once again this morning, this time over a Wall Street Journal suggestion that ‘IBM in talks to buy Sun.’ I am not able to comment on the veracity of the rumour itself, but it’s clear that Sun needs to do something in order to strengthen its position in a competitive market. Selling to IBM is certainly one route, but an easier one might be the provision of a more complete Sun-badged proposition.

Elsewhere on WSJ.com this morning, in news that seems extremely unlikely to be unconnected, Don Clark reports on Sun’s

“plans to offer its own cloud-style services. Sun also plans to offer software, as well as hardware, to other companies that want to build clouds.”

Alongside competitive enterprise server hardware and Sun’s widely used stable of open source software (Solaris, Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc), this latest announcement of ‘Sun Cloud Storage’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3) and ‘Sun Cloud Compute’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) should make Sun a serious player in the Cloud Computing space in a way that their abortive network.com never really did.

So why is anyone discussing either a desire on Sun’s part to sell, or a desire on IBM’s part to consider buying?

I’ve greatly enjoyed the insights of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, especially as enunciated most recently on his blog in two videos discussing community adoption of Sun’s open source software and the commercial models Sun deploys to monetise that community. Despite Jonathan’s arguments, though, it seems to me that Sun lacks a fundamental piece of the whole; an effective and highly visible professional services arm. IBM has this. HP, with the purchase of EDS, has this. Accenture and gang are this, but nothing makes them choose to use or recommend Sun over its competitors today.

As Jonathan discusses in the first of the videos I pointed to (YouTube version embedded below, in two parts), Sun has been successful in encouraging use and innovation around a suite of open source operating systems, tools and applications.

Indeed, it was little more than a year ago that the company announced plans to spend some $800 million in acquiring European open source web database company MySQL. The problem is that these solutions are all freely downloadable from the Web, and the inevitable professional services and consultancy work associated with enterprise delivery — which could generate so much revenue — goes to far more companies than just Sun.

Alongside the software, Sun has a competitive range of hardware offerings in the enterprise space, and sells these in competition with IBM, HP, Dell and the rest.

By omitting a compelling and enveloping professional services proposition, Sun damages its own ability to capitalise upon its software and hardware efforts. Potential customers download Sun software, and then run it on anything; Sun gets a very small slice of the hardware sales. Sun isn’t doing badly at selling hardware, but maybe a more rounded services proposition would enable them to do better, despite Jonathan’s points in the commercial innovation video.

With more emphasis on offering a comprehensive package of solutions — whilst not removing choice and the vibrant open source community of which Jonathan speaks — might Sun not be a more obvious choice for customers in need of services and support?

An acquisition might, as Larry Dignan writes, make sense. But there’s plenty of life left in a standalone Sun, too… if it can monetise more of those downloading free software or steer more of those who ‘just need a server’ towards one with a Sun badge on the front. Professional Services are the road to both.

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