Emerging SaaS platform wars akin to on-premise middleware wars
With consolidation in the middleware market fairly under way, adoption of SaaS platforms (i.e. PaaS) by solution partners represents the next land grab in the enterprise software space. Current key players include industry leaders and specialists such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Magic Software (UniPaas). Today's announcement by Oracle indicates that:

• R&D investment in the on-premise stack is very applicable to the cloud. As Oracle continues to strengthen it's "Red Stack" initiatives, it's looking at how to effectively win in multiple deployment options from hosted, single tenancy, multi-instance, and multi-tenancy. The platform offering currently includes Oracle database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle VM along with security and other high availability support. The existing partnership with Amazon WebServices show cases this commitment to work with other cloud providers.
• Oracle seeks to become the PaaS vendor of choice. Oracle's foray into SaaS platforms and cloud computing gains momentum as 250 ISV's have chosen the Oracle SaaS platform for delivery and development. ISV's include Adaptive Planning, Ariba, Asknet Inc., Blackboard, Callidus Software, CashEdge, Click Commerce, Inc., Docupace Technologies, dthree inc., EnterConnect, eXpresso Corp., frevvo, InfoNow, Intacct Corp., MAXIMUS, Inc., OpSource, Perot Systems, Sabrix, SuccessFactors, Teranode Corp., Where 2 Get It, Wireless Matrix, Workstream Inc., Xactly Corp, Zogix. The list of ISV's is impressive given the size of the vendors, industries, and geographies.

The bottom line...
SaaS platform wars will intensify as Oracle enters a parallell market where BEA, Microsoft VS.NET, and WebSphere traditionally played in the on-premise world. This move can be seen as Oracle's ambition to be the software deployment and development platform of choice for the cloud based computing world. In effect, Oracle now places itself in direct competition with SalesForce.com, NetSuite, and Google for mindshare and technology partnerships. ISV's looking for a PaaS partner now gain another option.
Your turn.
What are your thoughts on Oracle in the Cloud Computing space? Do you see Oracle as an effective provider of solutions for your ISV? Do you believe you can partner with Oracle? Does Oracle provide you with the right tools? Look forward to hearing from you! Feel free to post your comments here or send me a private email at [email protected].