How many Java developers are there?

Over 9M according to this blog post. I first looked at Java back in 1996. An engineer at Alcatel brought the first copy of "Java in a Nutshell" and said: "This is the future".

The author of the blog says that at the time of Java's open sourcing in 2007, there were 6 million Java developers and the number of Java developers had been rising at an average of 0.75 million per year during the previous two years. After Java was open sourced, that number shot up to 1 million per year.

Why the success?
From a technical point of view, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" and a solid set of APIs would do the trick.
From a business point of view, Free and a "transparent" Java Community Process would work, but a solid evangelist like Sun Microsystems is also needed.

As the back-end is moving to the cloud and the front-end is moving to mobile devices, Google and Apple are in control of the user experience. Java is still very relevant (through Android for the front-end).

Oracle To Acquire Sun Microsystems For $7.4 Billion

It's sad to see an independent company like Sun Microsystems being acquired but Oracle is probably a better acquirer than IBM and this acquisition has a high probability of success.

First, there is no hardware overlap. The OS and hardware from Sun will create a lot of synergies for Oracle as they will be able to offer completely integrated (hardware and software) solutions to their customers. The goal here is to reduce the costs of integration. I'm still amazed that IT teams have to spend money (directly or through integrators) to install and configure operating systems, middleware and enterprise software packages. I've heard that Oracle is only acquiring Sun for Java. I don't think it's the case. IBM and HP are Oracle's competitors and Oracle needs hardware to fight them in the marketplace.

Second, these are two bay area companies with similar cultures, much easier to integrate. They have been partners for over 20 years. They have developed joint call centers, and engineers and marketers on each side are very familiar with the other company's portfolio. It's probably not a good example to bring back to the table but Sun and Oracle were viewed as two of the four horsemen of the new economy back in 2000.

There is a risk that software vendors who competing against Oracle in the enterprise software area, stop supporting the Sun HW platform. Interesting challenge for the market development teams!

Sun unveils Virtualization Hypervisor

I'm very bullish on virtualization as the next evolution in the data center environment. Here's a very interesting announcement from my former company Sun Microsystems. VMware and Microsoft are the leaders but it's good to see convergence between software and hardware vendors in that space. As a start-up, we see very clearly the benefits of server virtualization for our development efforts. This is giving us a tremendous leg up to get our product out of the door while keeping our IT costs under control.

Evolution of the Data Center

As I am looking at the triangle to explain the transformations happening around content, networks, and devices I can't help thinking about the other changes happening in the IT industry. Is one driving or enabling the other?

In the past, I talked about utility or cloud computing and it seems that cloud computing is becoming the new buzz word. It is true that content providers, service providers and network infrastructure manufacturers believe in the same shared network service architecture. Cloud computing meets all the scalability, reliability, flexibility and performance (one could argue with this last one :-) required to deliver these services over the web.

Big players like Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and Amazon are already offering cloud computing services to other companies to run their software. Like email and web hosting in the past, this is not for everyone. Large companies still see their data centers as a competitive weapon and won't let anyone running it outside their four walls. They are using the same convergent infrastructure (server, storage, software) to make their own data centers much more flexible but it will be a while before they transition. This explains the success of VMware ($700M of revenue can't lie).

In the meantime, more cash-sensitive companies will buy computing resources on the web to run some of their software (or buy the service outright from salesforce.com). The data center is evolving to better server the business model outlined in the triangle.