It's recession time and Sun has the best recession kool aid.

So you're a CIO and you have several projects to deliver. The only problem is that you've had your budgets slashed.

What is a CIO to do....

Well I don't know if anyone has noticed but one of the coolest recession friendly enterprise software stacks around is being offered by that company we all love to hate: Sun Microsystems.

Consider this:

Sun has a really cool application server which is fully buzzword compliant in the form of Glassfish. Besides the fact that its pretty scalable with old Grizzly, it comes with a rock solid ESB and messaging system, A decent compatible web service stack, and on top of that it is dead simple to administer. And then of course lets not forget the awesomeness that is Glassfish 3.0.

Now Java and JEE can be a little heavyweight, but that's no problem, Sun supports Ruby and Ruby on Rails and has a Ruby interpreter that really rocks in the form of JRuby, and the best part is that you can run it on said application server. And If Ruby is not too your taste, don't forget Groovy and Grails, and soon Python with Django, and if you really want to go exotic there is Scala and Lift. All using it's battle tested core runtime environment otherwise known as Hotpsot.

Of course now you need to save your precious data in a database. Databases of course tend to be notoriously recession unfriendly. Once again Sun provides a proven lightweight solution in the form of MySQL.

Finally no system is complete without a little bit of User interface. Sun provides a good web stack with Glassfish, however you wanna got fat. No problem, JavaFX now provides a good fat solution.

So now you have all the libraries and runtimes, what about an IDE. Once again we have Netbeans, an increasingly one stop shop for doing development, besides doing Java and C++ it does Ruby, Groovy, Scala, JavaScript, PHP and it's newest addition: JavaFX, all with a simple easy interface and allows you to get up and running very quickly.

It's also worth mentioning that Sun also offers a slew of other tools, everything from a continuous integration server in Hudson to an identify management system in the form of OpenSSO, and countless other products.

Once you have all that together, you need an OS to run it all on. Once again you have the increasingly interesting looking OpenSolaris, or it's commercial brother Solaris, which once it's all said and done, is still one of the best OSes on the planet.

Now what is really cool about this whole stack is that everthing I've mentioned here is either open source or free, with support contracts available. If you wanted you could download all individual components and not cost to you, that's right no cost. How recession friendly is that.

But wait there's more, since you've saved all this money on software, why not look at some of Sun's hardware, which includes everything from fast Opteron servers to those Sparc boxes with like a gazillion CPU cores. Then of course there are those Jaw dropping ZFS based Open Storage systems.

So there you have it: If you need to get some bang for your buck, have a look at Sun: your one stop shop for all things EIS.

There is unfortunately one small little caveat...

Sun either isn't interested in dishing out it's kool aid, or is trying too, but no one seems to understand where to get some.

My employer recently bought a whole stack of stuff, and based on what they where looking for a stack like the one I presented here would have appealed to them. All Sun would have had to do, is bundle it up under the banner of a product suite and do some old fashioned selling.

The worst part is that I don't think the Sun people understand what they have. When you watch a Sun presentation you get bombarded with Sun's entire portfolio of products, the only problem is that they present them as a mass jumble of vaguely related products which simply overloads the presentee with information. There's no common theme to say: this is the value proposition we are giving to you.

Now I don't represent Sun in any capacity, but I would find it incredibly sad to see a company that does so much cool stuff fold, and see all this cool stuff potentially disappear.