An article about how SUN's work with MMOG in Business Week. It tackles the versatile and scalable MMOG middleware they are working on. What's interesting is that it presents SUN's vision:

Sun's chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos explains, "I argue that we've been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It's Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they're almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we've done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else" (...) "The difference you see between a lot of the technologies today (say, for example, Big World) and ours is that not only do we offer the scalability that they do, but I can take multiple games of different types, running across different hardware clients and run them simultaneously on the same stack of hardware." (...) "So what you can do is rather than building an infrastructure to handle a particular game, I can go to an operator that has built an infrastructure to handle 5 million concurrent players. I don't care if it is one game running 5 million players or it's a 100 games handling 50,000 players each or 1,000 games running 5,000 players each. It's the first solution that's able to do this.

The added value is then:

"Because you don't have to invest in any of that [hardware], we now providing a viable business model for a small developer and allowing him to take advantage of economies of scale that a utility model can provide. Because I can now build a single infrastructure to handle millions of people, I can now leverage a utility model, exactly like power companies or water companies can.