Sun's Cloud offering likely to face uphill battle until its future as an independent company is settled As much as I’d like to write about the rumored IBM acquisition of Sun, it’s probably best to leave that to others, for now. I have no knowledge of any real or purported talks between the two companies. I do know that if the deal goes through, I and many, many, many others will be impacted by it. Hence, it’s best not to write something on the spur of the moment.Instead, I’ll talk about Sun’s other reason for being in the news today: its Sun Cloud announcement at CommunityOne. Aside from the catchy product name — how long did the marketing team work on that one? 😉 — I’m happy to see Sun move in this direction. Sun is completely bang-on with its vision of:a world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open and compatible.Sun Cloud won’t GA until later in the summer, so for now, we’re making predictions based on a marketing pitch and, arguably, a demo at CommunityOne (which I am not at). Sun is promising to do much of what Amazon does today. Sun believes that its Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities will differentiate it from Amazon. According to Sun: VDC offers developers a single management interface for staging an application running on OpenSolaris, Linux, and Windows. A drag-and-drop method is used for provisioning compute, storage, and networking resources via a Web browser.It’s also interesting that Sun chose to use a Creative Commons license for its Cloud APIs. However, Glyn Moody tweets:Sun’s use of CC’d APIs to create an open ecosystem is interesting; doesn’t mean it’ll succeed, of course…I have to agree with Glyn. With the future of Sun up in the air, it’s difficult for me to see a mass of developers or customers seeking Cloud services and turning their back on AWS for Sun. But by the time the Sun Cloud becomes available, I suspect/hope Sun’s future as an independent company is more certain. Until then…Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues p.s.: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” Open Source