Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64, asked if Sun expected companies to move legacy applications into the cloud.

"History shows that people don't write new applications all that often, they try to port them," he said. "So what happens to folks with huge Oracle or SAP apps, running on large vertically scaled servers? Can they move them into the cloud?"

"I think you'll see people leave those untouched," Douglas said. "But they may look to see if someone has a comparable service in the cloud, and switch their on-premise Siebel applications to Salesforce.com, for example," he added.

Sun acknowledged that there is much work for the industry to do in areas like security and management. And Sun needs to flesh out its xVM virtualization management software, Bozman said.

Like other companies, Sun may find it tough selling new cloud infrastructure products at a time when many companies are cutting back on spending, Brookwood noted.