By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

So there's this great book out there called "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" in which the author Mark Kurlansky chronicles how this humble fish in its own right toppled empires, gave rise to new economies and generally provided us everything that we have today, including the Internet. Seriously, no joke. Check it out. The book's been out there for some 10-15 years, but what brought it to mind recently was Kurlansky's factual, neat debunking of Christopher Columbus from explorer and discoverer of the New World to just another party crasher in funny pants.

 I won't do the story justice here, but to paraphrase Kurlansky, the Basques in Spain had been known since before the year 1000 for their salted cod fish, which curiously did not live in the home waters of Spain. Sales of cod received a nice tail wind when the Catholic Church decried that only cold meats could be eaten on lean days of observance, which included Fridays, all days during Lent and few odd days of observance thrown in for good measure. Lots of people eating cod. Lots of happy Basques. Then, in 1497, sometime during Columbus's five-year victory lap of Europe for stumbling on the New World while looking for Asia, a French explorer "discovered" the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and claimed it for France. It may have been tough to see the French flag flying though, what with a 1,000 Basque fishing boats clouding the view.

So what does this have to do with the software heavyweights? Well, apparently they've recently discovered that on-demand is how software will be delivered to the enterprise. And in brave proclamations both have set their flag to the continent. Um, guys? Did you hear that there's, like, a whole industry around this stuff? In an announcement on June 10th John Wookey, SAP 's new head of on-demand software applications for large companies, said that SAP would be releasing on-demand applications in "waves" to complement existing SAP business applications. Just last May, Larry Ellison, of Oracle and boating fame, quipped that on-demand segment was growing very slowly and in not so many words was the poor barefooted cousin of the licensed applications business. Seems Ellison is reversing fields: last Wednesday in an earnings call Ellison stated that Oracle plans to be #1 in on-demand applications. Interesting. Wonder if Wookey's move from Oracle head of applications and Ellison confidant to SAP last year played a role here? Seriously, this stuff has more twists than an episode of Lost.

Meanwhile, as the software giants posture, those of us who have been living, building, breathing on-demand for the last 10 years are just sitting here on the beach, eating fish.

By Jamus Driscoll, Demandware Marketing

As a company of on-demand zealots, we here at Demandware are 100% behind the belief that on-demand is the software model of the future. I could riff for quite some time as to why-it puts accountability on the vendor for the quality and performance of the software, it helps the retailer innovate faster and realign internal resources to brand-differentiating site experiences-but sometimes it's better to let others do the talking.

In an article published this week in PC World, Mark Benioff, Saleforce.com's CEO, has thrown down the gauntlet, right on Oracle's shiny red shoes, calling for an "end to software maintenance fees." Maintenance fees, the plumpest and most tractable of Oracle's many cash cows, accounted for $2.9 billion in Oracle's third quarter alone and yields 90% margins. Moo. Benioff, no stranger to explosive quotes, references one Siebel customer saying, "This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center. She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to

implement the updates that Siebel sends her. That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology. The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work."

Benioff is also quoted as writing that the customer, "is paying tolls on a road to nowhere." Ooof.

The man, for all the rhetoric, speaks Truth. You could take most everything he's quoted as saying in this article and apply it to ecommerce. The only edit I'd suggest? Double the emphasis. Double the impact. It's one thing to talk innovation and uptime in CRM. It's another to talk innovation in ecommerce, where consumer expectations of an ecommerce site are set and reset constantly by their cumulative Internet experience. It's another thing to talk downtime in ecommerce, where millions of revenue not to mention brand reputation, can be sacked by some obscure technical gremlin lurking the depths of the platform. And for all this trouble, the retailer with a licensed software platform has the privilege of paying maintenance, for the opportunity to inherit the burdens of innovation and to meet the dirty little gremlin on some Cyber Monday. That doesn't feel like winning.

Benioff smacked the nail on the head with this one.