Expect to wait up to a decade for 'On-Demand' world, says report

Analyst Views published a report yesterday that rounds up what some analyst firms (i.e. IDC, Gartner, Saugatuck) are saying about on-demand computing (and the other names it goes by) to see if anything has changed since a previous study done last fall.

The verdict is that although on demand is gaining traction in enterprise IT, expect to wait up to a decade for widespread adoption. "We believe that within 7 to 10 years, on-demand computing will be the normal mode of operation in most large enterprises, and it will be increasingly popular with medium-sized businesses," said the report.

The report is at odds with Gartner's claim that on-demand will lead to significant job loss:

We do expect a shift of IT jobs away from in-house enterprise IT departments to the companies providing on-demand services. We believe that this will be similar to the movement of jobs from enterprise IT departments to large IT services organizations from outsourcing contracts.

Salesforce.com's disruptive business model will be copied:

We also expect that on-demand computing will force application vendors to radically change their business models away from software licensing to pay-as-you-go or a software-as-services model. Several vendors, notably Salesforce.com, are well positioned to be major players in the future on-demand computing world.