Vendors can build revenues from services and subscriptions, while CIOs, CEOs and the businesses they lead are freed from the “slavery” of traditional software procurement processes, said Sun’s Simon Phipps, speaking at a Sun developers conference in New York City.

In the midst of industry speculation that IBM might buy Sun for some $6.5 billion, Sun also used the event this week to announce the Sun Open Cloud Platform, a.k.a., “Sun Cloud,” along with the first two services from Sun to be based on the new private and public cloud environment.

Sun: Open source frees CIOs (and others) from ’slavery’ | IT Systems News – Betanews

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.”

IBM-Sun Pairing Would Help IBM Get into the Cloud: BusinessWeek | Open Source Magazine