Cisco and Sun elbow into mobile world with cloud initiatives
Published: 19 March, 2009
News from the enterprise technology world is increasingly worth noting in telco land, as companies like IBM and Oracle bring their systems to the carrier market, and look to underpin the mobile web services boom as they did in the corporate arena. So rumors that IBM is preparing a bid to acquire Sun Microsystems, plus 'cloud computing' initiatives from Cisco and Sun itself, will all affect the way we use mobile services in future.
The rumored IBM bid, worth $6.5bn in cash, would put a 100% premium on Sun's market value, according to The Wall Street Journal, and while neither company would comment, analysts see many good fits, including a stronger presence for the larger firm in telecoms. Both companies are key supporters of Linux-based servers and open source, and will be looking to bring these models into the mobile and telco worlds, and achieve the same shift to openness that the enterprise has already seen.
Sun's growth strategies are heavily focused on servers for web players, many of them mobile; and on supporting the move of consumer and business services to 'the cloud', a market it entered this week. It unveiled a public cloud service aimed at developers, students and start-ups and outlined plans for an open cloud computing infrastructure - a set of open APIs allowing clouds to interoperate - which will mirror the way it created many of the underpinnings for the internet.
At the heart of the Sun Cloud Compute Service are the Virtual Data Center capabilities acquired with Sun's purchase of Q-layer in January, which provide tools to build and run a data center in the cloud. Many cellcos will be looking to do this to support their own processes and consumer services, or relying on third party managed services in the cloud.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Cisco unveiled a major new initiative, Unified Computing, that will take it up against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the enterprise server market but, more significantly, taps into Cisco's vision of a change in how consumers access data, which will increasingly be from low cost IP mobile devices, talking to vast data and apps centers hosted by internet players like Google, or service providers and their server partners.
"Virtualization to us means any device connecting to any content from anywhere," Chambers said. "Eventually, we see the data center carrying all the way to the home. Consumers won't know if it's a set-top box or an iPhone processing the data. They just want the application."
Cisco's Unified Computing rests on an architecture for a 'virtualized' data center in which data and apps from many sources round the world can be integrated in a virtual way. The architecture includes blade servers plus an interconnection fabric and network adapters. Supporting partners include Intel, Microsoft, storage maker EMC and virtualization expert VMware, itself a pioneer of bringing these techniques to the handset, to support multiple user profiles on one device.
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