Earlier this month I posited in a blog post that Cisco and WebEx will be our major competitors, not Salesforce.com when all is said and done.

I was thinking far down the road…but Cisco is continuing to impress me with its creation of great network pipes that will make really cool application visions possible, beyond what we think of in terms of SaaS today. Nicholas Carr blogged today about Cisco’s Nexus 7000 switch, which essentially would allow some robust app delivery (since it can send a few thousand DVDs worth of data in a few seconds…pretty cool).

So, again, this is what scares me when it comes to On-Demand applications - having a huge infrastructure that allows any type of app to be delivered. I am less concerned about a proprietary application sitting in a data center. Anyone can do that. But Cisco and WebEx could be a tough tandem to beat if they get into more than just collaborative apps.

The ideal, as I see it, is for companies like SugarCRM to leverage the delivery options that Cisco provides. SugarCRM’s innate flexibility and web-based nature allows it to more seamlessly mesh with delivery models promised by Nexus 7000, more so than Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics or any of the MS Live apps (well, maybe some of them are just as web-native). Either way, it is something I am sure we will be thinking about and ready to take action on when we can really take advantage of such a fat pipe…

One artist’s rendition of the Nexus 7000…