A Blog About Sun Microsystems Russ Castronovo

I was very interested in seeing the story from Chris Preimesberger of eWeek talking to Sun's Cloud CTO, Lew Tucker about Sun's upcoming cloud offering. His commentary about legacy applications was so interesting I asked Lew to give me more of his thoughts, especially on the timeframes for migrating applications to the cloud.

Lew was hesitant to predict a timeframe.  "If you look at legacy apps, they weren't designed to fit into the cloud computing model and may therefore never migrate to the cloud," said Lew.  In interacting with Lew, it seems likely that HR, CRM or other application may not be actually be migrated, but rather will  be replaced by a newer, web-based applications that cover the same functionality.

Lew added, "its hard enough even moving an existing application from one traditional data center to another, let alone move it to the cloud as well."  However, virtualization does offer a lot of promise.  Particularly for a company that has already moved some of their applications onto a virtualized infrastructure as part of an overall server consolidation effort, then there is some chance that those applications may be able to run in the virtualized environment of a cloud.

Lew's last thought to me led me to think that a stampede to re-write applications might not happen right away, "Migrating legacy apps is still hard, and may be unnecessary.  A company doesn't have to change everything to take advantage of cloud computing.  It can be a gradual process of bring in more and more cloud services over time."

Thanks to Lew Tucker for his time.