Cloud player acquired by SUN

January 10, 2009 in CloudViews by hugo.mag | 2 comments

In my my first post I asked the question “What new applications will it bring?” but as many as you know, at this time we are already seeing new applications to pop up.

One of them is QLayer that sells Virtual Private DataCenter (VPDC). SUN has acquired it recently so the interest in the cloud keeps growing.

Geeks and entrepreneurs, its time to build your cloud company and offer yourselfs to big players!!

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  1. Eric Novikoff’s avatar

    Eric Novikoff on March 15, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    We were looking at using QLayer’s technology in our cloud service, however despite the presence of their website, it has essentially been taken off the market, which brings up a number of questions (besides the obvious one of what will Sun do with it?) However the bigger issue is that with all the M&A activity in the industry, using cloud technology from a startup company puts cloud service providers at risk of losing their technological underpinnings, unless they develop their own. And developing your own, as many hosting companies are doing today, is truly a mistake as well since you won’t be able to keep up with the innovation that the market is expecting without a large investment outside your area of expertise and focus (how many hosting providers know how to manage a large software project?) All this creates more vendor lock-in issues for cloud hosting companies’ end-customers. We are solving the problem by providing unique and value-added services on top of cloud technology from established players that are already profitable and have a large enough customer base that their product won’t be discontinued in the event of a merger or acquisition. It will be interesting to see how the cloud computing orchestration industry solves this dilemma between innovation and risk…

    -Eric Novikoff
    ENKI
    http://www.enkiconsulting.net

  2. hugo.mag’s avatar

    hugo.mag on March 17, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    Hello Eric,
    Thanks for your comment.
    This is in fact, as you said, a dilemma that we have. In the past we had similar issues (for instance when Google bought JotSpot it took them 16 months to relaunch the service) and this will surely happen in the future.

    Investing (as an user, partner, etc.) in a specific platform or service, technology, etc. that is very recent obviously has more risk that going for an established company. On the other hand these platforms can bring other benefits that more established company might not have, for instance Coghead technology (with drag&drop forms and workflows) was very appealing to developers, something that for instance Quickbase didn’t have.