Network.com closes to new users

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Thanks to Joe Landman for the pointer to this article at The Register

Sun logoSun Microsystems has killed its once high-profile utility computing experiment, Network.com, which let customers buy computing power by the hour.

The company revealed it’s no longer accepting new customers after four years, saying parts of the business and technology model “were not in the sweet spot”. The 13 customers and 48 applications using Network.com are will [sic] be offered continued service.

Yikes. Four years and 13 customers. That is pretty brutal. But Sun isn’t willing to totally admit defeat. Network.com is sporting this announcement

We’re Making Changes
Network.com is in transition as we add some exciting new options. We’re not ready to show off what we’re working on just yet, but we’d like to hear from you, and we’d like to keep in touch.

Which The Reg reads this way

Reading between the lines, it seems Sun will now evangelize clouds and provide its own hardware and software with a view to running customers’ clouds. “We will have a grid going forward,” Douglas said. “It may just not look like the old one.” He added that Sun might run its own branded cloud services in some cases.

…Existing enterprise customers are likely to be Sun’s best bet. For all Sun’s talk of clouds, the sad fact is that Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com – those owning the mindshare – are not using Sun equipment. They are running a mix of Linux on Intel servers – which Sun can provide, but are – clearly – no Sun’s crown jewels of Solaris and Sparc servers.

Trackbacks

  1. […] that in early December Sun announced it was closing Network.com to new users while it figured out what to do next. Q-layer will evidently add technolgy to the portfolio of […]

  2. […] this road before, first with SunGrid and then the Network.com rebranding,  which culminated in a shut down back in December. I think it’s very odd, and disturbing if you are a Sun customer, that they aren’t […]