And guess who else is an on-demand player!

Oracle Corporation. Yeah, sometimes its easy to think of them as the old guard. And make a major under-estimate of Oracle's technology vision. But the company's opinion on on-demand is public now.

Oracle's Charles Phillips: On demand is the future by ZDNet[...]

And this means something. Oracle's no.2 executive is'nt talking about on-demand applications. That too, in some measure, but he's really talking about the infrastructure to deliver on-demand - databases and middleware. Scalable, reliable and cost efficient on-demand needs grids built with Linux-Intel powering it. Oracle ofcourse can very credibly claim to have figured this out and brought solutions to market faster, better than anyone else.

That's where they shine. The future's bright, and I share Mr. Phillip's view. The more enterprise AND consumer computing moves on-demand, consumed like a utility, the better it gets for Oracle's infrastructure products. (Somehow the utility connection always makes me think of on-demand infrastructure like the turbines of a power plant!). Its not going to be easy to get them off that perch anytime soon in the big enterprise. No secret Microsoft wants to get there. So does SAP. Both still got much climbing to do. IBM actually had a place, but lost it with DB2 on Linux. What's to say WebSphere can't go the same way?

Granted, open-source believers would say that they're creeping up too (literally creeping up the tech stack), and MySQL and JBoss are the nascent seeds of something that Oracle needs to worry about. But that's a pretty far way off. By that time Microsoft's going to be way more than worried, Windows might have gotten corroded by Linux. And there's some chance that salesforce.com might just keep making steady progress alongside and grow their infrastructure services (Multiforce and sforce) to become an on-demand 'applistructure' force to reckon with. Its a shot they have. And that's something for another post.