Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos found a bright spot in the current economic downtrend that he shared with writer Jeffrey Burt of eWeek in a recent interview. According to Papadopoulos cost consciousness is causing managers to have a closer look at cloud computing, virtualization and green IT, a trend that is likely to accelerate, given the condition of the economy, he added.

“In any other time, people may say, ‘Yeah, I’ll check out [cloud computing] in a year or so,’” Papadopoulos said. “They might decide to look into it later. But the [current] economy acts like an accelerant. It’s like dropping napalm.”

Jill Eckhaus, CEO of AFCOM, seconds the position taken by Papadopoulos, basing her view on recent surveys conducted of AFCOM members. “The economy changed some of the trends, and virtualization was one of those trends,” Eckhaus said.

As with virtualization, so with cloud computing, both Eckhaus and Papadopoulos contend, adding that the momentum behind that movement lags somewhat, probably as a result of managers not having a clear picture of that technology.

Papadopoulos told Burt that there has been confusion among IT administrators about the definition of cloud computing, in large part because there are really three aspects to it:

• infrastructure as a service - where businesses access compute power over the Internet;
• SAAS (software as a service), where enterprises get applications through a browser; and
• PAAS (platform as a service) area, embodied by such technologies as Microsoft’s Azure offering and Google’s App Engine.

Further clouding the picture, he added, is the confusion about public clouds and private, internal clouds. Companies like Sun, VMware and Elastra already are working on ways to bridge the two, Papadopoulos said, predicting the eventual rise of the “intercloud.” Just like the Internet is a network of networks, the intercloud will be a network of public and private clouds, Burt writes.

Both Papadopoulos and Eckhaus noted the increasing interest in open-source software and green IT, driven alike by the need to save money.

Papadopoulos concluded that, though Sun has lost money in the current economy, the strong demand for open-source software and CMT offerings in the last quarter are heartening. Revenues in its CMT systems grew 31 percent, and Open Storage and total software categories grew 21 percent each, he noted.

More Information

Complete text of Burt\'s article

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