DMR: A lot of our telecom customers are looking for a standard or standard body that basically creates a common, exchangeable ecosystem.

Lew Tucker: Sun has always recognized the importance of open standards for our customers and our business. We believe that an open strategy leads to more market opportunity and makes it easier for customers to talk with us without fear of vendor lock in. In a growing market, all benefit. Vendors compete on the implementations, the excellence of system architecture, and the other services. I believe this leaves plenty of opportunity for the various players to compete and differentiate their offerings. Agreeing upon a standard API will simply help the market expand more rapidly.

DMR: We see private Clouds and public Clouds merging, Cloud being expandable. Do you think that this is going to be the future … 

Lew Tucker: Absolutely. There will be both some very large “public” clouds, companies building their own on-premise (private) clouds, as well as some hybrids. We've already seen a lot of companies that have moved entire applications such as CRM out to SaaS companies in the Cloud. Others would like to be able to tap into the resources available in the Cloud by extending their on-premise network to a virtual data center at a cloud provider. This would give the company more flexibility during peak demand and allow the company to avoid having to carry excess capacity on site. This has come to be called “cloud bursting” and the idea is that the customer could push some applications to a public cloud during peak times. The issue is: How do you do this safely? How do you extend your network out into the Cloud? This is where network providers have a particular advantage. Whether it’s MPLS or other kinds of secure means of extending a network from a private Cloud out into a public area, those in the telecom industry have the technology in place to make this happen.

DMR: With all these opportunities at hand, what kind of stumbling blocks do you see in the telecom industry? 

Lew Tucker: The biggest question for the telecom industry is how quickly it can catch up, and how it can foster the kind of innovation that will be required. We are at the beginning of this era of Cloud Computing and much remains to be done. Telecoms are in an ideal position because they own the networks, but will need to innovate to be major players in this market. They have inherent advantages in delivering network-based services such as private networks, load balancers, firewall services, content distribution networks, etc, but will need to move fast. Telecoms should look and see what services they are already providing and consider using the Cloud as another avenue to bring these services to the marketplace.