I saw a great talk by Jonas Bonér (guy behind Akka) at the S.F. Scala group a few years ago. He said he fell in love with Erlang but eventually gave up trying t

I saw a great talk by Jonas Bonér (guy behind Akka) at the S.F. Scala group a few years ago. He said he fell in love with Erlang but eventually gave up trying to persuade people to deploy it and that Akka was basically an attempt to bring the core Erlang principles over to the JVM. Personally I think people are too paranoid and should worry less about deploying a new VM but a lot of commercial IT shops are very conservative.