Sun, Amazon, and cloud computing

Wow - I see that Sun's stock price is up 58% this morning because of an announcement that they are going to compete with Amazon in the cloud computing business. I have used Amazon's EC2 service on a customer project, I am creating a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with all of the examples for my book project for APress, and I have a future business idea that I expect to use Amazon's cloud services to implement.

Anyway, I have always appreciated Sun (especially when they sent me a free black leather jacket with the Java logo embossed on the back after the publication of one of my early Java books) and as a company I wish them well. That said, Amazon's cloud services come close to perfection, so Sun has real implementation and business challenges. Sun does have a plan for security (compliance to data safe guard requirements, etc.) which is one area the the cloud providers need to get right if more companies can (legally) use cloud services. I expect that this is an area that Amazon is also working on.

Update: I just heard that IBM is considering buying Sun, so that is likely the reason for their stock price bump, and not their cloud services initiatives.