Force.com is big in Japan. This is my personal revelation after recently visiting the country that, for me, is the sanity check for what is really, really hot in the technology world and what is not. Facebook is hot. Twitter is, well, nobody seems to know how to pronounce that in Japanese. But, Force.com is smokin’ hot.

Having lived in Japan for several years and being at the helm of both Peoplesoft Japan and Epiphany Japan, I know from personal experience that SIs in Japan are the gatekeepers to the customer in that market. And the SIs in Japan apparently love Force.com. Who wants to worry about the hardware, network, and software stack when you don’t have to? Custom apps and highly customized apps still play a prominent role in that market, and what better way to deliver and maintain those apps in a high-quality way than on a rock-solid Platform-as-a-Service system like Force.com? As it turns out, there really are high tech consumers outside the west coast of North America, and Force.com seems to be just what the doctor ordered for a large number of those customers. Given the angst that ISVs in North American have toward Force.com, this was a big revelation for me.

This revelation put an interesting spin on my perspective of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems yesterday. Sure, they get MySQL. And they get Java too. I’ve heard gloom and doom scenarios from a whole lot of developers today who feel this means the end of the Open Source software business model and the end of portable software applications.

But I’m not so sure I share that doom and gloom sentiment. One could argue that the commoditization of IT—partially represented by both MySQL and Java—are macro trends that even Oracle would benefit more by exploiting rather than resisting. Oracle has yet to kill off a major brand they have acquired in their quest for total dominance of the enterprise software ecosystem, and I don’t see any reason why they would reverse course now. They totally dominate the sales channel into the IT department, and having more to offer—not less—seems to be their core strategy for continued dominance.

Instead, I see the acquisition of Sun as serving a different purpose. For the past several years, Sun has attempted to build itself into an infrastructure computing company, more recently referred to as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or, more affectionately, “Cloud Computing”. Add MySQL, the dominant commodity database, and Java, the dominant enterprise programming language (recall that Force.com uses a Java derivative language), and you’ve got yourself one heck of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture. In short, by acquiring Sun, Oracle has put itself into a great position to deliver its answer to Force.com.

However this plays out, one thing seems true: the days of technology “products” are numbered. The future of technology is all about service. And when business is all about service, the customer wins.