Sun follows Amazon into the cloud

To be fair Sun’s Scott McNealy has been talking up the cloud computing concept since the early days of the internet. Unfortunately, Sun never really did much to convert the lofty idea into a service for the masses like Amazon has. Recently Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted that a deal between Sun and Amazon having to do with cloud computing services is on the horizon. Perhaps by teaming with Amazon, Sun can finally realize McNealy’s dream.

When I asked him about Sun — and cloud computing especially — in light of the recent trend in which startups now have more of an affinity with Amazon Web Services than Sun, Schwartz replied with a question: “Do you think it would make sense for us to partner with Amazon to offer free info on the cloud?” I guess, I said. “Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon.”

He pointed out that Amazon has done a great job of evangelizing the whole notion of cloud computing, and of bringing infrastructure as a service to startups. “Amazon knocked the ball out of the park,” he said. For Sun, the opportunities are with mid-size and large corporations — like banks, pharma and financial companies — that need to build their own clouds because they cannot use Amazon type on-demand computing due to certain legal and regulatory limitations. (GigaOm)