Last month, Forrester Research released a wave report about companies that provide elastic caching solutions. After speaking with Forrester in some detail, I'm convinced that the technology will become an integral component of application platforms -  both on premises and in the cloud. Now is the time to take notice.

Elastic caching solutions add scale to applications without requiring developers to re-architect applications, or add additional servers or virtual machines. That capability is especially critical in cloud computing, where data can become a bottleneck, and developers have to pay for what computing they use. "People talk about cloud computing being scalable, but data in a database doesn't scale easily," explained analyst Mike Gualtieri, one of the report's authors. "Data is locked into one database, and can't shard across databases without a redesign. Caching can help scale data across multiple instances [of an application]. Microsoft's decision to fold its "Velocity" caching technology into Windows Azure was an astute acknowledgment of this problem, he added.

"People don't understand this yet, but this is actually a cloud story," Gualtieri added. "[Elastic caching] is one of the gaps to be filled in for scaling data in the cloud."

Some caching solutions have advanced the state of the art to where high-speed data analysis is possible through Map/Reduce techniques. In plain English, that means that work is taken to the data instead of moving data to work. That technique can help solve bandwidth problems that would otherwise occur when working with large data sets, Gualtieri explained. Both Oracle and ScaleOut Software, a company that specializes in creating in-memory data grids, have this capability. You may recognize Map/Reduce through its association with Hadoop, an open source project that takes a disk-based approach for working with massive amounts of data. Commercial solutions including Aster Data work much the same way - with varying degrees of performance.

While using all memory is seen as being less economical than a disk-based approach on a very large scale, using Map/Reduce to apply a method on objects/namespaces in an all memory grid creates new opportunites in e-commerce, finance and other applications that require instant (and fault tolerant) data analysis.

Industry heavyweights including IBM, Oracle and currently dominate the elastic caching market, according to Forrester's weighted assessment based on technology and strategy. Newcomers GigaSpaces and Terracotta are likewise listed as leaders. The report also highlights several smaller players as being strong contenders including Gemstone on the Java side, and Alachisoft and ScaleOut Software on the .NET side (although ScaleOut supports both platforms). Oracle, through its acquisition of Coherence, and Gigaspaces originated the category.

Gemstone was recently acquired by VMware, TIBCO is entering the market with a product called "ActiveSpaces," and Terracotta is a possible acquisition target for Red Hat, which is also entering the market, Gualtieri noted. While it has developed its own caching technology, Microsoft's Velocity is not as robust as its partners' solutions , he said. Microsoft traditionally leaves room for its ISV partners to make money, but could realistically acquire either Alachisoft or ScaleOut, he added.