Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products and services from.

Not only do women make most of a family’s health decisions but 48% of graduating physicians are women and women compose 73% of medical and health services managers. As a healthtech startup, we think heavily about the importance of what I call the Family Chief Health & Wellness Officer (aka “Mom”). Avado is not unlike many startups in that we have two male co-founders.  We’d be fools to not figure out ways to bring the female perspective into our business.

A bootstrapped startup such as Avado has many challenges, but it also possesses some key advantages. I want to share one key advantage related to this topic. I think it may be one of the biggest untapped reservoirs of talent. The beauty of startups is results matter much more than rigid hiring practices. Big, dumb companies often have rules that preclude a huge category of the potential workforce from being tapped. It’s a category that I’m familiar with as my wife was previously a marketer at Apple and Microsoft, yet it’s likely neither would hire her right now as her time commitment with our kids during the day doesn’t allow her to show up during a normal work hours. However, we get the benefit because she is able to help us with our marketing in the windows of time she has.

Another thing dumb employers do is look at gaps in “normal” employment as a big drawback. Let me give you an example of a new member of our team that we are absolutely thrilled to have on board. Julie Braman is our new Managing Director of Innovation for Pharmaceutics and Biotech. She and I worked together when I was running Microsoft’s health business and she was the founder of another industry business – pharmaceutics. Julie chose to stay at home while her kids were growing up. As I know with my wife, that hardly means one’s brain shuts down. Rather, it brings an entirely new perspective the business can benefit from. In fact, perhaps the most important trend in healthcare and the focus of the recently rolled out Stage 2 of Meaningful Use is “Patient Engagement.” As a member of the “sandwich generation,” many former professionals turned stay-at-home moms not only have had responsibility for their children but many are also increasingly responsible for their parents’ health. This gives them a particularly unique perspective. Since patient engagement is our central focus, the perspective of a boomer female head of household is invaluable.

Having Julie join the team is a real win-win. She is able to jump back into a very meaty job without skipping a beat. For Avado, it’s a no-brainer. Julie was one of the pioneers in bringing pharmacists into active engagement in primary care practices while she was a practicing pharmacist at Group Health — this is a rapidly growing trend with the shortage of primary care physicians. Julie was also in Sales with pharma giant, Eli Lilly, so she understands that perspective as well. As Life Sciences has proven to be fertile ground for Avado, I couldn’t think of a better fit and I couldn’t care less that she’s been “out of the workforce.”

Julie is far from unique. Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and others have written about the lack of women in tech yet there is a group of tech veterans re-entering the workforce that are an untapped reservoir. While many of my female colleagues continued working full-time, there are a boatload of them who either worked part time or were full-time Chief Health & Wellness Officers. Their kids have grown up and they are ready to fully re-engage with the workforce. They worked for the defining companies of the 90′s such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others that were the Facebooks and Googles of their time. In other words, they were the cream of the crop then and they are the cream of the crop now. We feel lucky have them join our team and think other startups would be just as lucky if they learn how to engage this untapped reservoir of talent.

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Aetna: The Company Scaring Its Competition And Delighting Startups

Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing (Part I of III)

NASA puts the technology like this:

Each STEREO probe photographs half of the star and beams the images to Earth. Researchers combine the two views to create a sphere. These aren’t just regular pictures, however. STEREO’s telescopes are tuned to four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation selected to trace key aspects of solar activity such as flares, tsunamis and magnetic filaments. Nothing escapes their attention.

A Google spokesperson has given us the following statement:

“It’s disappointing that after years of supporting open source, Oracle turned around to attack not just Android, but the entire open source Java community with vague software patent claims. Open platforms like Android are essential to innovation, and we will continue to support the open source community to make the mobile experience better for consumers and developers alike.”

Google’s response, which we’ve embedded below, details the history of Java and its origins at Sun. It points out Oracle’s repeated calls in the last few years for Sun to fully open-source the Java Platform and for the Java Community Process to provide “a new, simplified IPR [intellectual property rights] Policy that permits the broadest number of implementations”. However, according to Google’s filing, Oracle’s stance changed as soon as it bought Sun:

Only a couple of months later, in April of 2009, Oracle Corp. announced that it would be acquiring Sun (renamed Oracle America after the acquisition was completed in January of 2010). Since that time, and directly contrary to Oracle Corp.’s public actions and statements, as well as its own proposals as an executive member of the JCP, Oracle Corp. and Sun (now Oracle America) have ignored the open source community’s requests to fully open-source the Java platform.

This isn’t the only legal battle Google is facing over Android. A few days ago, Microsoft decided to sue Motorola over patents related to the OS — a suit that is conveniently timed to coincide with the impending launch of Windows Phone 7. The rationale? Google’s Android is free, which Microsoft can’t very well compete with, so it’s trying making sure there are some patent fees associated with the OS (Microsoft already successfully bullied HTC into signing a patent licensing agreement). Google has also issued a response to that suit:

“We are disappointed that Microsoft prefers to compete over old patents rather than new products. Sweeping software patent claims like these threaten innovation. While we are not a party to this lawsuit, we stand behind the Android platform and the partners who have helped us to develop it.”

Apple also has its own legal war against Android — in March it filed a suit claiming that HTC was violating 20 patents.

I’m no lawyer (hey, at least I’m upfront about it), but these patent disputes seem like bad news for the industry as a whole. We’re at a very important point in the development of mobile devices, as multiple platforms surge back and forth and web apps prepare to take on native apps for mobile supremacy. I’d like to think that, five years from now, the winning platforms will be the ones that best adapted to consumer needs — not the ones that had the largest portfolio of vague, decade-old patents and most experienced legal teams.

Update: Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger has given us this statement:

“In developing Android, Google chose to use Java code without obtaining a license. Additionally, it modified the technology so it is not compliant with Java’s central design principle to “write once and run anywhere.” Google’s infringement and fragmentation of Java code not only damages Oracle, it clearly harms consumers, developers and device manufacturers.”

IBM put out a new report (embedded below) on security threats to enterprise computer networks today from its X-Force security research group. It found a 36 percent increase in security vulnerabilities, with Web applications being the main culprit. Web apps with security exploits accounted for 55 percent of all disclosed vulnerabilities.

One of the biggest threats are hidden attacks using Javascript. There was a 52 percent rise in such “obfuscated attacks” in the first half of 2010. The increased adoption of cloud computing and virtualization brings with it its own security threats. For instance, 35 percent of virtualization vulnerabilities affect the hypervisor, meaning that gaining control of one virtual machine can give attackers controls of other machines on the same system.

Another increasing source of attacks come from PDF exploits, which usually are downloaded unsuspectingly through links on Websites. Malicious PDFs spiked 37 percent, and those are just the ones that were detected. PDF exploits are being used to spread the Zeus and Pushdo botnets.

Interestingly, run-of-the-mill phishing scams seem to be down, with an 82 percent decline since their peak last year. But They are still the single biggest threat for financial institutions, which make up about half of all phishing targets, followed by credit cards, the government, online payments, and auctions.

The report also ranks the vendors by percentage of unpatched vulnerabilities.  Sun, which is now owned by Oracle, tops the list with 24 percent unpatched vulnerabilities, compared to 2.6 percent last year during the same period.  Microsoft is second with 23 percent, Mozilla is third with 21 percent, Apple is fourth with 13 percent, and IBM is fifth with 10 percent.

Update: It looks like IBM was forced to revise some of its numbers and methodology, and is itself now the company with the most unresolved “critical” security bugs with no patches over the past six months (29 percent). In terms of overall unpatched vulnerabilities (not just the critical ones), Microsoft now tops that list with 23 percent, followed by Mozilla (17 percent), Apple (12 percent), IBM (9 percent), and then Sun (8 percent). Oops.

IBM X-Force Vulnerability Threats 1H2010 http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=36404495&access_key=key-1ua6bep9wz5el900ds3o&page=1&viewMode=list

Yes! The Solar Impulse’s flight that I mentioned yesterday was a huge success! It landed safely in Switzerland after a 26-hour haul across the Heavens. The people behind the flight hope that it will prove to skeptics that solar power is a viable form of energy after all. I mean, powering all of life on Earth apparently means nothing to these skeptics, but to see an aeroplane in the air? Money.

You may be thinking, “Wait, it was in the air for 26 hours? What happens when the Sun sets?” Nothing more than good, old fashioned batteries.

The plane was loaded with 12,000 solar cells, cells that collected the Sun’s rays as it streaked across the sky. High in the sky, too, reaching an altitude of 28,543 feet.

Now, the overall idea behind the flight is to prove to the haters that solar power is sufficient for human machines. Yeah, the Sun gives life to, um, life, but that’s not exactly the same as powering an aircraft. What can you say now? Solar power kept the Solar Impulse in the sky for 26 hours! Its backers say that they can keep an airplane in the sky for as long as they want, provided you stick enough solar cells and have enough batteries on there.

Does this mean that your next flight to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving will be on a solar-powered flight? Of course not, but it could serve as an example to the big manufacturers out there that, hey, maybe it’s worth putting together a solar-powered prototype or two? Oil’s not going to be around forever—never mind how expensive it is to extract as it is!

We, and by “we” I mean all life on Planet Earth, owe our very existence to the Sun. It’s nothing more than a typical star, really, but without it, this planet would be as barren as the day is long. (CG: Your home for old-timey phrases.) With that in mind, here’s what could become a pretty important story as we move forward. NASA now believes that, for much of the modern era, the Sun has been, for lack of a better term, “asleep.” What happens, then, to our electricity-based infrastructure when the Sun “wakes up”? The Solar Wind has already blown away the atmospheres of planets lacking a magnetosphere, so what else does the Sun have up its sleeve?

The Doomsday Scenario is as follows:

The Sun wakes up—think increased solar flares, sun spots, you name it. All these things can have a direct impact on the electrical systems here on Earth. Anything that uses electricity, then, could be at risk. Your iPhone. Your Nintendo DS. Your bank’s computer servers, GPS. Air travel. Traffic lights. All of these things could be completely knocked offline. We don’t really know how large, or how small, the impact of a proper solar storm because we haven’t seen one in the modern era.

We could potentially be looking at a scenario where our already teetering economic system could be subjected to a jolt that twenty times worse than Hurricane Katrina.

What a time to be alive!

But what Jonathan did for Sun, and the rest of the industry, was to twist the conventional wisdom of the enterprise into a new shape now being leveraged by a host of successful players. Jonathan somehow got that ubiquity in the consumer space would translate into platform power. The rising tide of the social network has its roots in many of the things Jonathan was saying long before it was popular or even wise politically.

Probably nobody could have pulled off what Jonathan was tasked to do. At Oracle’s absorbathon last week, Larry Ellison reiterated his nothing-new-here cloud bashing while actually affirming the investments Schwartz made in consolidating the best of breed system solutions Oracle will use to go after weakened competitors like SAP who looked the other way as Salesforce expanded.

The rumblings at the end were that Jonathan couldn’t close the IBM deal, forcing McNeally to quick-punt to Ellison. But Ellison’s analysis of the Sun assets shows that most if not all of the value Schwartz claimed in the financial community will be reflected in revenue from Day One, that keeping Java away from IBM will turn out to be a hugely valuable investment, and that a nuanced use of MySQL as a customer-facing sales tool for the SMB market will stave off the growth of any other open source database.

As the smoke clears from this epic consolidation, what’s left are the explosive pairing of Apple and Google in the new mobile architecture, predicted by Schwartz with his relelntless observation that devices go to free. With Oracle/Sun now positioned as the fuel for the virtualization layer of the cloud, the big freakin’ webtone switch of this era, the iPad Era launches a race to spread the gospel of the financial community infrastructure across the micromessage bus and its media partners.

Jonathan Schwartz was brought in to finesse the transition from the Good Old Days to the Good New Days, and he’ll deserve to harvest irreplaceable time with his young family. It will be interesting to see him return, because he has little need to reinvent himself given his early and prescient take on what is now transpiring.

Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.

Just in case you weren’t planning on attending or following the major Apple event.

The approval comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened in September amid concerns that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would stifle competition in the database market. In August 2009, the Departement of Justice had already given the deal green light.

From the press release:

The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.

Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.

“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner.

The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission added.

We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision—an application development environment that not only targets the web as its native platform, but uses cutting-edge web innovations such as web services, social networking, and Web 2.0, to change the way applications are built, deployed, scaled, and delivered to where users congregate.

Zembly was an interesting attempt to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Orkut, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets with the developer community. But apparently, Sun’s bold vision didn’t quite cut it, so it’s cutting zembly loose and shutting the service down at the end of this month.

In a message sent to its users and posted on its website, the zembly team says the service will be suspended on November 30th, and the FAQ teaches us that all applications and services currently on zembly will be made unavailable, along with the user data of all members of the community.

Users have until the end of this month to get hold of their application code and widgets.

Zembly is now part of the illusive TechCrunch deadpool.

Sun says that it will be eliminating the jobs over the course of the next year in locations worldwide, and that the cuts have already begun. There are reports that there may be even more cuts once the acquisition is complete.

We’ve updated the Layoff Tracker with the news.

Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.

Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.

In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day?

Oracle CEO and Founder Larry Ellison is making a rare speaking appearance on the evening of Monday, September 21 to talk to the Churchill Club audience in San Jose, Calif. We’re lucky enough to have five tickets to give away to TechCrunchIT readers. Ellison will be speaking to Ed Zander, former CEO of Motorola, and former President of Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired earlier this year, beating out rival IBM. It should be an interesting conversation considering the magnitude of the Oracle-Sun deal and its implications for the enterprise space. To win, send a Tweet to @TechCrunchIT with the hashtag #tcit telling us what you would ask Ellison given the chance; we’ll pick the five best questions on Sunday evening.

The Churchill Club has also generously created a special “startup” package for those interested in becoming Churchill Club members. They can get half off for a year membership to the Churchill Club and ticket to this event. You can call (408) 254-0130 and mention “TechCrunch Rocks” to get the discounted membership.

However, as Matt Asay noted earlier, no mention of MySQL in the ad.

(Thanks to @Toon for the tip)

Then it was on to incoming owner Larry Ellison, who Scott framed with a few setup remarks about what he called a merger before engaging Ellison in the only Q&A allowed under the terms of the pre-acquisition interregnum. It was all about Java, of course, neatly sidestepping the hardware plans and focusing instead on Sun’s latest Microsoft counterattack, JavaFX. Ellison positioned the Silverlight/Flash clone as the development environment for netbooks and an AJAX-less version of OpenOffice. This was in odd counterpoint to Google’s Android strategy, which is spreading from phones to Acer netbooks while leveraging Google Web Toolkit to write Java apps that compile into Javascript code.

At Google I/O Google engineering chief Vic Gunodtra — who leads similar duties after managing Microsoft developer strategies — outlined an integrated strategy that incorporates GWT and the open source Eclipse IDE as a way of moving rapidly away from proprietary code to an HTML 5 platform built on “modern” browsers that already run on Chrome and FireFox. Ellison seems to be suggesting JavaFX as a way of capturing those same Java developers Google is squiring, though JavaFX is not supported by Eclipse but only by Sun’s NetBeans environment.

Though Ellison cited his “friends” at Google, the sentiment echoed the “merger” talk McNealy was pitching until he carefully handed his new boss a signal flag that the two straddled as Scott translated the letters as J A V A. Whether you buy the good news that Sun’s and Oracle’s R&D budget is between $4 and 5 billion annually, it will be interesting to see whether Ellison’s nod toward the mobile desktop and a new front against Office is serious. With Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin and Steven Martin keynoting Thursday’s session, Oracle and Ellison may be fighting the last war and giving Google room to consolidate around a strategy that marginalizes Java as a programming language, keeps Java off the iPhone, and creates a three-front war that allows Microsoft to slipstream Silverlight into a netbook Office play.

Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart. It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday.

Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.

As the NY Times points out, Oracle and Sun are two heavyweights that have been partners for more than 20 years, even if Oracle has been distancing itself a bit from Sun’s server line in favor of competitors like HP and Dell lately because of Sun’s business decline. As a result of this deal, Oracle will now become a behemoth in both the software and the hardware market, and the implications this acquisition will have on the its closest rivals and the market in general will be noticable for years to come.

The official release, with emphasis ours:

Oracle to Buy Sun

SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 20, 2009 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network is the Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Earlier this month, discussions over a potential takeover broke down when IBM withdrew its earlier $7 billion bid to buy Sun.

Discussions have stalled, still according to the sources, and both companies are now waiting for the other to make a move.

The information provided by the two unnamed sources implies that Sun withdrew exclusive negotations with IBM because there were apparently no guarantees that they would ultimately stick with the takeover if the companies encountered barriers such as an antitrust review. So basically Sun is saying: if you’re going to talk the talk, you’d better be prepared to walk the walk.

Spokesmen from both companies declined to comment.

Meanwhile, other potential acquirers like Cisco Systems and HP are acting like their noses are bleeding, which means nothing has really changed since last week, except for the fact that acquisition talks between IBM and Sun have simply been delayed rather than blown off completely.

(Image credit: InternetNews.com)

Oh noes! IBM withdrew its $7 billion bid to buy Sun Microsystems. The company has no other offers outstanding, which may mean that the well-known and well-loved Unix server supplier will have to go it alone in an uncertain economy. One interesting point, from NYT:

The Sun board did not reject the offer outright, but wanted certain guarantees that the I.B.M. side considered “onerous,” according to that person.

IBM dropped its price to $9.40 and the requirements included changing the management team and the movement/removal of some senior employees. Sun’s stock dropped to $8.49 last Friday.

IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $7 billion. This would turn IBM into a one-stop shop when it comes to Unix server sales, a fairly lucrative niche in this cloud-happy world.

I.B.M. is offering $9.50 a share, down from a bid of $10 a share, said people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. The new agreement would restrict I.B.M.’s ability to walk away from the deal, these people said.

My favorite memory of Sun is flying from Moscow to Warsaw back in 1999 and two guys from Texas talking about implementing web servers in Germany or something. One would say something like “They want an e-store, maybe.” and the other guy would say “Ok, we’ll get a Sun box in there.” Everything – website, ecommerce, auction site – “We’ll get a Sun box in there.”

The official statement doesn’t provide much more details, and the terms of the agreement remain undisclosed ‘as the transaction is not material to Sun’.

Q-layer’s technology simplifies and automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s refocused strategy, according to the company.

Q-layer was founded in 2005, has about 35 employees and bills itself as the first company to introduce full data center virtualization by integrating server, network and storage virtualization. The company raised a total of €8.3 million in two rounds, which currently converts to about $11.3 million.

Source: Virtualization.com

(Full disclosure: one of the co-founders of Q-layer, Niko Nelissen, is also one of the two founders of internet startup Oxynade, of which I’m also a partner).