Microsoft Fuels Cisco's Jump Back in On Demand?

It looks like Microsoft's new On Demand Initiative [Covered in other posts below] is reviving, via lot's of marketing money back into the advertising stream, core technology providers interest in Software as a Service.

Cisco has linked up [no pun intended] to MCI/Verizon in an effort to simplify LAN services for SMB's. In the same breath it looks like they are reviving Hosted hardware efforts via programs caled Linksys One.

Red Herring Article

In the article, there is no real mention of any software. So the interesting part will be what companies are going to do with the Hosted services, in terms of fast hardware deployment [IE 1hr, etc..]. It looks like an immediate focus on Telecom.

Article from Cisco Site

If/When they expand, I imagine all SMB's, and pretty much all AEC companies due to the migratory nature of business, would still face a lot of challenges in configureing the platform to do anything useful. With AEC particulalry, the issue does not seem to be the complexity as much as the onsite availablility of any one at all.

In any case, looks like a good re-emphasis on the On-Demand initiatives that have been on cruise control until companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.. started to re-market the catch phrases late this year.