Sun Microsystems is without doubt one of the largest telecom vendors world-wide. Sun's network computing infrastructure solutions are used in a wide range of industries including technical and scientific, business, engineering, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government, life sciences, media and entertainment, transportation, energy and utilities as well as healthcare.

Lew Tucker spent much of the '90s at Sun and contributed to the explosive growth of Java and growing Sun's presence on the Internet. In 2002, Lew joined Salesforce.com and led the design and implementation of App Exchange, which remains one of the largest cloud computing success stories to date.

DMR: What is Sun’s vision on Cloud?

Lew Tucker: Sun, all along, has been a driver in the evolution of the Internet. We envision a world of many Clouds, public, private and hybrid that are open and interoperable. Sun plays in all these areas.  We have a very large developer community, large enterprise customers and we work directly with a lot of large web providers. Cloud spans the range of technologies that Sun provides our customers – data centers, servers and networking. Cloud computing is a natural fit with Sun’s business models.

DMR: A lot of our customers immediately think “Amazon” when I say “Cloud”.

Lew Tucker: Amazon has jumped into a leadership position in cloud computing by leveraging their experience running a massive infrastructure for their retail site, but when you think about the components necessary to run Clouds it might just has easily been telecoms to first offer Cloud services. They have the scale to benefit from the multi-tenancy characteristics of Cloud, the network, and the relationship with customers. While it’s interesting to see Amazon as the market leader, I would have expected it to be the hosting service providers or the telecommunications and network providers. Cloud computing is all about networking. Telecoms can provide many network services into the enterprise along with the service provisioning that they do right now for their customers. By adding compute and storage servers, they can quickly make an impact in Cloud Computing. What’s interesting is that there does seem to be pretty widespread agreement on the basic components that are needed at this “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” layer. Sun has been working with a number of standards bodies to discuss the viability of a common API and it's one of the reasons why we put the Sun Cloud APIs into the public domain. Anyone who wants to implement it or extend it in any way is free to do that.