What does it mean for Oracle to buy Sun and Virtual Iron? A play for the Cloud

Last summer I signed up for a developer account with 3Tera in their AppLogic Cloud environment to begin testing it as a a place to move our current managed hosting environment. During that same time, we met with Oracle to discuss licensing Oracle in the 3Tera AppLogic cloud. The guys we spoke with could only think in terms of physical cores for their licensing model. At the end of the conversation, after an hour of extreme frustration, I issued them a very strongly worded challenge to go back to Oracle and figure out a licensing model for virtualization and the cloud or Oracle is going to be left in the dust.

Fast forward one year to the present and we are hearing that Oracle is making a play for Sun Microsystems and then another announcement for Virtual Iron. With Sun owning MySQL, that had me concerned as well as many others. When I then heard about Virtual Iron, built on open source Xen virtualization, I was again concerned.

But as I started thinking about the combination of these two companies within Oracle, the only conclusion I could draw is that they are going for their place in the Cloud market. Sun not only has the hardware, but they also have OpenSolaris which you will find often in the cloud. Additionally, Sun has some great storage offerings. And a good storage solution is critical in the cloud. Add Virtual Iron's implementation of Xen virtualization to the recipe and Oracle is cooking up a potentially fantastic cloud dish.

Let's wait and see what happens. If I'm right, I'll be first in line to take the Oracle cloud for a test drive.

Later....