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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sun shares fizzle after IBM talks fail (financialpost.com)
• Oracle To Buy Sun For $7.4 Billion (gigaom.com)
• IBM Is in Negotiations to Buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 Billion, WSJ Says (Robert Valpuesta/Bloomberg) (techmeme.com)
• Oracle and MySQL: Ally or Die? (sitepoint.com)
• Sun-IBM Merger Hits A Snag (gigaom.com)
• Reviewing Sun’s Open Cloud Platform & API (elasticvapor.com)

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sun’s missing mojo: MIA until when? (news.cnet.com)
• IBM, Amazon foreshadow bevy of connecting clouds (news.cnet.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Moves: Who Wins, Who Loses? (gigaom.com)
• Cisco’s Data Center Play Reinvents The Server (gigaom.com)
• Sun takes another swing at cloud computing (infoworld.com)
• Sun CEO: Open source = free advertising (news.cnet.com)
• Sun Microsystem Business Revenues (Latest Discovery) (it-sideways.com)
• Schwartz: Not worried about Sun’s future (infoworld.com)