Overheard - IBM and Sun, a marriage in the cloud

Earlier this week, Sun made its entrance into cloud computing with plans to offer compute and storage services built on Sun technologies, including OpenSolaris and MySQL. IBM has been pursuing a different strategy, building the infrastructure for cloud computing, but not yet offering to host a cloud. Bill Snyder, Why we should all hope IBM buys Sun

Rumors abound that IBM is in negotiations to acquire Sun Microsystems. Dana Gardner says “Sun wanted this out to prop up its stock or is in talks with another party and is using this to drive up its price,” but I’m going to agree with Bill Snyder and say that it’s the real deal.

IBM and Sun together make a lot of sense. They both spend tons of dollars on R&D and their approaches to cloud computing are complimentary.

As the consolidation wheel keeps on turning, the interesting question is “If IBM provides the infrastructure and Sun provides the compute and storage services, who will provide the software”?