Rented applications fit beautifully with Oracle's vision of a simpler and more reliable form of computing based on the open standards of the Internet and the Java programming language.
Erlang, developed by telecommunications company Ericsson for massively parallel computing in a phone network, then later released as an open source language, both influenced Scala and is enjoying some rebirth in the world of global data centers.
The idea, says Buell Duncan III , IBM's general manager for ISV and developer relations, is to create a network of companies large and small, which are conversant in both nonproprietary, or open, computing standards, like the Linux operating system or the Java programming language, and IBM's suite of hardware, middleware and services.