. "The model is giving everybody a virtual datacenter," Tucker said. Developers and others would be able to create a virtual datacenter for servers, networking, storage, and other services and manage it all as if they would their own datacenter, he said. Tucker anticipates some competition with Amazon's cloud services. Sun Cloud will feature language bindings for Java, Ruby, and PHP. Sun has not yet announced pricing for the service, but customers will pay on a CPU hour basis, Tucker said.

"I do believe with cloud computing, we are dramatically driving down the cost of computing," he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Tucker participated on an industry panel on cloud computing, which pondered such issues as standardization for cloud computing and applications for it.

"We absolutely do need some notion of standards and a way to operate across different clouds," said Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale.

But another panelist warned  of possible problems.