at the precipice

Through yesterday's Sun announcement of new hardware solutions, I was able to acknowledge to myself that I, like Sun, are at the edges of a comeback. It has been a difficult half-decade for both parties, but both seem better positioned to impact the marketplace after doing the requisite searching that is needed to turn back from the edge. Sun is once again a product company, and I am once again a solo-entrepreneur. It is a challenging venture and one that I cannot say with complete confidence will be an initial success. I am living with the understanding and conviction that it is a mission to be attempted and with all ventures that involve risk, there is potential reward.

I must also acknowledge that Sun is no longer my company, and that the direction it goes in will be a revenue run toward relevance, that most likely will be directed through hardware servers. This is a challengin concept to all of us who know what Glassfish could mean. It is also very
Solaris-driven which has the potential to completely backfire on management given the undeniable push toward standards-based Linux. JBoss has bet on this, which says to me that it is not unreasonable to believe that they can make something big out of it. But it is now Glassfish that intrigues and is the upstart in the Java OS equation. I know my venture will be betting on its success in equal measure to JBoss.

What will JBoss SSO and Open SSO turn out to be - - that is yet to be determined, and yet to be investigated, but it might be a stop-gap between now and the likely formation of federated Identity management. What should I do to make this happen? Well for those paying attention I am throwing my personal initiative behind Diamelle and its attempt to modularize IDM into an app market solution. Where that will take us is anyone's bet right now, but it would seem that we're all making far reaching bets in the nascent SOA market. Sun is betting on capacity which is a good bet. Oracle is betting on maintenance to support a WebLogic acquisition. Red Hat is betting on JEE which is a solid bet. Lots of start-ups are betting on development tools to carry them through the opaqueness of the day. we are betting on pre-built apps, and no we are not going near Oracle for some time.

I am near a personal precipice that will only be revealed the further I go in to it. I believe that this will be a turn of events that will eventually lead me to sustainability, but until then I will be rolling along, watching...

Music I need: the Streets, Lady Sovereign, Kweli: Right about Now, Ziggy Marley, The Little Willies, and DP's 20:20 would be good to listen to.