IBM's chances of being a major player in the era of cloud computing would be enhanced by a merger with Sun, says BusinessWeek.

IBM can also afford the $6.5BN acquisition that is apparently being discussed since it has $13BN cash hoard, notes BW Senior writer Steve Hamm.

In his report published today, the day after Sun announced its Sun Open Cloud Platform at an event in New York, Hamm writes that "IBM would be taking a risk by purchasing Sun…with no assurances that Sun's cloud offerings will take off," but he also stresses that a Sun acquisition "would give IBM a better entree into another segment of the nascent market: providing technology to the companies that operate cloud data centers for large consumer-oriented Web services such as Facebook and Google's YouTube."

Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz watches a presentation by IBM's Steve Mills at JavaOne 2005

The synergies between IBM's and Sun's cloud strategies will be nowhere more apparent than at SYS-CON's upcoming 3-day Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which is being held March 30-April 1 in New York. Because the top executives in charge of cloud initiatives from both companies are both giving keynote addresses.

First, on March 31, Dr Kristof Kloeckner, IBM's CTO of Enterprise Initiatives and VP of Cloud Computing Platforms, will be giving a keynote entitled "Cloud Computing and the Enterprise" in which he will drawing on IBM’s experience working with customers and operating 13 cloud centers worldwide to review the conditions under which cloud computing can deliver its promise of flexibility and cost savings in the delivery of IT services to the enterprise.

Then the following day, April 1, Sun's David Douglas - who is both Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun and also its Sr. Vice-President of Cloud Computing - will be keynoting on Sun's vision of "A World of Many Clouds" and drilling into the details of the company's strategy to provide interoperability for large-scale computing resources through open and transparent cloud platforms that minimize lock-in.

The keynotes by Dr Kloeckner and Dave Douglas are complemented by a third keynote address, to be given March 30 by Amazon.com VP & CTO Dr Werner Vogels.

In addition to these three distinguished Keynote Speakers, SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which is being held at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, features a top-notch lineup of breakout session speakers from the leading companies active in the main three layers of the Cloud ecosystem - the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications and services.

The lineup includes, among others:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com
• Dr Kristof Kloeckner - VP of Cloud Computing Platforms, IBM
• Davis Douglas, Sr. VP, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
• Vik Chaudhary - VP of Corporate Development, Keynote Systems
• Peter Coffee - Director of Platform Research, Salesforce.com
• Russ Daniels - CTO of Cloud Services Strategy, HP
• Doug Tidwell - Senior Software Engineer, IBM
• Ajay Anand - Director of Grid Computing, Yahoo!
• Martin Ingram - VP of Strategy AppSense
• Jim Blakley - Director of Data Center Virtualization, Intel
• Brian H. Prince - Architect Evangelist, Microsoft
• Ronnie Thomson - Sr. Vice President of Engineering, Quark
• Tim Crawford - Director of IT Operations, Stanford University
• David Bernstein - VP & GM of Cloud Computing, Cisco
• Glenn Brunette - Chief Security Architect, Sun
• Sajai Krishnan - CEO, ParaScale
• Ken Oestreich - Vice President, Egenera
• Stephen Elliott - Vice President of Strategy, CA
• Warren Wilbee - Director of ISV Evangelism, Microsoft
• Lucian Lipinsky de Orlov - Director of Business Strategy, VIRTERA
• Patrick Kerpan - CTO, CohesiveFT
• Jim Rymarczyk - Chief Virtualization Technologist, IBM
• Thorsten von Eicken - CTO and Co-Founder, RightScale
• Owen Garrett - PM and Technologist, Zeus
• Scott Sanchez - Chief Technology Architect, Unisys
• Scott Wiener - Co-Founder & CTO, Cloud9 Analytics
• Jeff Bauer - Creative Director, Forbes.com
• Anthony Arrott - Special Assistant to the CTO, Trend Micro
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• David Bressler - Principal Architect, Progress Software
• Clod Barrera - Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist, IBM
• Tien Tzuo - CEO, Zuora
• Raghavan Srinivas - Technology Evangelist, Intuit
• Brian Zanghi - President & CEO, Kadient
• John Trembley - Vice President, Xeround
• Ranjith Ramakrishnan - Co-Founder & CTO, Cumulux
• John Barr - COO & VP Engineering, Yieldex
• William Fellows - Principal Analyst, The 451 Group
• Kevin L. Jackson - Director of Business Development, Dataline
• Bob Quinn - Founder, Chairman & CTO of 3Leaf Systems
• Pau Garcia-Mila - Founder, eyeOS
• David Linthicum - Editor-in-Chief, Virtualization Journal
• Bryan Wade - Director of Channel Partnerships, ExactTarget
• Bill McColl - Founder & CEO, Cloudscale
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Jon Pyke - Chief Strategy Officer, Cordys
• Daniel Beveridge - Director of Virtualization Strategy, VIRTERA
• JP Morgenthal - IT Architecture Consultant
• John Gauntt - Founder, Media Dojo
• Ed Sullivan - Founder & CEO, Aria Systems
• Raghavan Srinivas - Technology Evangelist, Intuit
• Brian Zanghi - President & CEO, Kadient
• Simon Wardley - Software Services Manager, Canonical
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Michael Hill - VP Enteprise Initiatives, Sales, Services & Business Development, IBM
• Steve Milroy - Solution Architect, OnTerra Systems
• Prof Rich Wolski - University of California, Santa Barbara
  

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