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Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his MIX09 keynote that Microsoft Velocity, a distributed cache solution currently in CTP, would ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4. For application developers seeking to add scalability to web applications on a shoestring, this is interesting development.

When Microsoft announced in June 2008 that they had been quietly working on a distributed cache solution, code-named Velocity, it quietly upset the status quo among commercial distributed cache vendors. While Velocity is nowhere near as mature or as feature-rich as competitors such as Oracle Coherence, GemStone GemFire, and ScaleOut StateServer, it has at least two truly compelling features: price (it will be free) and distribution (it will come packaged with one of the most widely used development environments in use today). Still, it remains unclear just how much Velocity will eat into the market share of its more mature competitors.

In the case of Coherence and GemFire, which both compete at much higher price ranges, Velocity might not have much impact. The demographic for these products is relatively price-insensitive and is generally no longer trying to evaluate if it needs a distributed cache but which one.

ScaleOut StateServer, on the other hand, which competes at a more mid-range price bracket, also tries addresses a demographic that is still deciding if it needs a distributed cache and whether or not it can afford one. For these consumers, Velocity may be the first hands-on experience they have with distributed cache, and it will be the task of vendors like ScaleOut to upsell them and knock them out of a complacency with the free products they will already have.

Of course, where any of these products can differentiate on features, such as enterprise support, geographic replication, and grid computing abilities, Velocity will not have much impact. But then again, where is the growth market for distributed cache? If it's in the head of the market, Velocity will be just noise. But if it's in the long tail, the future of Velocity could be very bright.