Until now, I hadn't heard about Elastic Caching yet. Today I read Mike Gualtieri's Blog entry.
I immediately thought about Oracle Coherence and got a little scare throughout the reading. Elastic Caching is the next step after Distributed Caching. As we've always positioned Coherence as a Distributed Cache, I thought for a brief instance that Oracle had missed a new trend/technology.
But then I started reading the characteristics of an Elastic Cache.
Forrester definition: Software infrastructure that provides application developers with data caching services that are distributed across two or more server nodes that

• consistently perform as volumes grow


• can be scaled without downtime


• provide a range of fault-tolerance levels

Hey wait a minute, doesn't Coherence fullfill all these requirements? Oh yes, I think it does!

The next defintion in the article is about Elastic Application Platforms. This is mainly more of the same with the addition of code execution.
Now there is analytics functionality in Oracle Coherence. The analytics capability provides data-centric functions like distributed aggregation, searching and sorting. Coherence also provides continuous querying and event-handling.

I think that when it comes to providing an Elastic Application Platform (as in the Forrester definition), Oracle is close, nearly there. And what's more, as Elastic Platform is the next big thing towards the big C word, Oracle Coherence makes you cloud-ready ;-) There you go!

Find more info on Oracle Coherence here.