Sun Microsystems sure had some very nice things to say about the zembly project when it was introduced a couple of years ago:
We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to change the way applications are built, deployed, scaled, and delivered to where users congregate.
Zembly was an interesting attempt to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets with the developer community. But apparently, Sun’s bold vision didn’t quite cut it, so it’s cutting zembly loose and shutting the service down at the end of this month.
Earlier today Sun Microsystems announced that it would be cutting 3,000 members of its workforce, less than a year after the company announced plans to lay off up to 6,000 of its employees. Sun blamed the latest wave of layoffs on delays involved in Oracle’s acquisition of the company, which was annouced last April but is currently being held up by European regulators.
Sun says that it will be eliminating the jobs over the course of the next year in locations worldwide, and that the cuts have already begun. There are reports that there may be even more cuts once the acquisition is complete.
MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, is Benchmark Capital’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.
Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.
Gotta love this advertisement from Oracle, directed at current Sun Microsystems customers (and now rival IBM), stating its intentions with SPARC and Solaris before the monster acquisition is even a done deal. It’s a full-page ad that appeared in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal today, and you can find it online on the Oracle website as well.
However, as Matt Asay noted earlier, no mention of MySQL in the ad.
(Thanks to @Toon for the tip)
Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart. It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday.
Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.
The official release, after the jump:
Looks like Sun Microsystems is open to renewing acquisition talks with International Business Machines (IBM) if the latter makes a stronger commitment to actually closing the deal, according to Bloomberg sources.
Earlier this month, discussions over a potential takeover broke down when IBM withdrew its earlier $7 billion bid to buy Sun.
Discussions have stalled, still according to the sources, and both companies are now waiting for the other to make a move.
The information provided by the two unnamed sources implies that Sun withdrew exclusive negotations with IBM because there were apparently no guarantees that they would ultimately stick with the takeover if the companies encountered barriers such as an antitrust review. So basically Sun is saying: if you’re going to talk the talk, you’d better be prepared to walk the walk.
Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure.
In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”
We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be
published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater
cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be
as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to
participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to
act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved.
That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company
or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the
opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.
As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.
Sun Microsystems is elevating its presence in the cloud with the acquisition of Belgium-based Q-layer, which is in the business of automation of cloud computing deployments. Q-layer will become part of Sun’s cloud computing unit.
The official statement doesn’t provide much more details, and the terms of the agreement remain undisclosed ‘as the transaction is not material to Sun’.
Q-layer’s technology simplifies and automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s refocused strategy, according to the company.
Sun’s difficult position has been covered here, in business circles, and even in the land of puppets. So when Jonathan Schwartz surfaces with the launch of JavaFX 1.0, naturally the question in everyone’s mind is how exactly a client technology is going to advance Sun’s position in the marketplace as it downsizes to avoid a possible collapse.
Schwartz comes out swinging in the video embedded below, talking of Java’s strong position on desktops and what he calls the majority of mobile devices. He frames the discussion around the desire of companies to escape from the lock-in of the browser, dividing the world conceptually between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google Chrome (presumably including Firefox and its growing share.) As he details a range of screens through which to project Java power, you can even see an iPhone on the far right though Java, like Flash, is shut out of the Apple smartphone.
The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.
Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.
JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.
Sun is releasing a new version of client-side Java insipidly called SE 6 Update 10 that sets the groundwork for JavaFX, a major overhaul of the runtime environment set to debut before the year’s end and challenge other RIA platforms such as AIR, Silverlight, and Google Gears.
Update 10 comes with two major consumer-facing improvements: a smaller footprint and enhanced speeds. Whereas the current version of Java comes as a 14.5mb download, the newest has been slimmed down to 4.5mb. This will matter most for Windows users who don’t have high-speed internet access (since Java comes prepackaged on Macs and the difference of 10mb is inconsequential over broadband). Nevertheless, the move reflects Sun’s commitment to trimming down a technology that has been criticized for its bloat (many optional components no longer come preinstalled but must be added to the kernel after-the-fact).
Is Microsoft finally learning to love the penguin? After years of fighting Linux and denying its very usefulness, Microsoft has recently changed its tactics. It is trying to be more open, even if that’s an attempt to appease European regulators. And today, it is announcing the beta of new data center management tools that—gasp!—recognize that some companies might be running something other than Windows on their servers. Now it will support two flavors of Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) and two flavors of Unix (HP-UX and Sun Solaris), all from one management console. The name of the software is System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions. Yeah, I can’t remember that either.
What Microosft is signaling here is a new tactic in the war against Linux, which it realizes is not going anywhere. So if Microsoft can’t beat Linux, it will try to smother it with love by offering a way for IT folks to manage and control all of their servers using Microsoft software. But it is a little late to the game. HP’s Openview, Tivoli, and BMC already offer such capabilities. Microsoft can still make inroads, though, by competing on price and ease of use.
Embracing openness and other software is also a good idea. Microsoft new data center management software supports open standards such as Web Services for Management and OpenPegasus. At the same time, Microsoft is also announcing new virtualization management software (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) that will let IT managers control virtual machines running on EMC’s popular VMWare, as well as Microsoft’s own virtual machines. (Virtualization is a big trend in data centers that effectively splits and segregates jobs on one physical server into many virtual ones). For those interested in more, you can read all the gory details in the press release.
Database software provider Greenplum has taken $27 million Series C is a round led by Meritech Capital Partners that included Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures.
Greenplum leverages open source database software and incorporates a “shared-nothing architecture that employs parallel processing on commodity hardware.”
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said that the investment, in conjunction with their recent acquisition of MySQL, provided further evidence of Sun’s commitment to the open source database community and marketplace.
The company has previously taken two rounds of $15 million each in March 2006 and February 2007. The new funding will be used to continue development of Greenplum’s database software, as well as to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts.
Reports at Infoworld and CNet News that Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX at the Java One Conference in San Francisco today.
The announcement follows the recent well received launch of Microsoft’s Silverlight, and as an offering will compete directly against AJAX as well.
JavaFX is said to be a new scripting variant of Java with a focus on development for the consumer communications market, including desktops, mobile clients, and TVs. The first product release is JavaFX Mobile, a software system for mobile devices.
We won’t know a lot more about the new offering until after the presentation, however my immediate thoughts are that what we are seeing here is a game of catch-up by Sun. The object-oriented applications programming language that is Java was once the cool kid on the block, a base from which a new generation of applications would be launched, taking over our desktops. And yet it never happened. The new product, with its focus on mobile technology presents the potential of dealing Sun back into the application game in a big way if it’s well received today by developers.
