On Dec. 9, 2008, Sun Microsystems called together the usual-suspect journalists and IT analysts in San Francisco to announce the launch of a new Sun division focusing on providing cloud computing goods and services to enterprises.

Following a full year in stealth mode, the unit is now moving forward with its strategy, which can be described—with a whimsical tip of the cap to Emma Lazarus' inscription at the Statue of Liberty—like this:

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of legacy software yearning to breathe free, and we will move that functionality into the cloud, so it may perform anew for amazed customers.

Sun is focusing on converting older enterprise data centers first because that's where the migration problems are cropping up.

Resource Library:

Sun, celebrating its 27th year in 2009, always has provided the resources to put together a cloud computing system. This includes hardware (Sun Fire blade servers, StorageTek storage arrays and even its own branded network switch), server and storage software (OpenSolaris, GlassFish Web server, MySQL database, Zettabyte File System, Lustre backup and recovery package, and others), and networking software (Java) for general enterprise data center use.

The company also has retooled its services group for cloud service duty.

Sun's new Cloud Computing CTO, Lew Tucker, was on the original Java development team with Dr. James Gosling in the early 1990s. Once Java was up, running and well-established, Tucker left to become a vice president at Salesforce.com, where he led the development of AppExchange, a SAAS (software as a service) platform for business applications.

After that, Tucker served as CTO at Radar Networks, a semantic-Web-based Internet service for tracking interests. He rejoined Sun in 2008 as CTO of cloud computing and reports to David Douglas, senior vice president of cloud computing and Sun's chief sustainability officer.