• The business is increasingly in charge - the technology must be more supportive
  Windows of opportunity in the business world have shrunk alarmingly (for example, the lifecycle for many consumer packaged goods is now measured in weeks, rather than months), and large projects lasting many months are increasingly perceived as incapable of supporting the business. Flexibility is required, at a far more granular level than has been required in the past.
• Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are becoming the norm
  Organisations are looking to the utilisation of SOA as a means of matching business tasks with technical functionality. However, an SOA has to be built on a flexible foundation that creates a platform independent of hardware and operating systems.
• Heterogeneity is here to stay - removing dependencies is key
  Organisations have invested heavily in existing hardware and software solutions, and it is unlikely that wholesale change in the short term will occur. Virtualisation of the underlying technologies and integration of existing application services points the way towards meeting the needs of tomorrow's organisations.
• Now is the time for change
  A Service-Oriented Architecture, based upon an open and flexible underlying architecture, utilising an enterprise bus providing solid data transaction, transposition and transport will provide enhanced flexibility for the future. Standards are now in place with broad industry acceptance - SOA is being accepted by companies as the way forwards.
• There are issues with application centric approaches
  An application-centric approach to creating a suitable application platform/middleware solution may not provide the end-to-end flexibility required by the business, and may make a company more dependent on the ongoing capabilities of the application vendor in tracking and managing the changes in standards and process flows in the market.
• The "Glass Walls" between an organisation and its partners are disappearing
  Business processes go beyond the control of the organisation's control - technology solutions must be capable of supporting and reporting on processes that move along supplier and customer lines.
• Tooling, maturity and independent software vendor support are key for a platform choice
  A suitable platform must be capable of utilising common tooling so that skilled resources are easily available. It is also key that the platform has adequate support within the independent software vendor (ISV) sector.

CONCLUSION
Organisations wanting to create a more flexible, responsive environment to support their business processes must look towards the evolution of an environment that removes the process dependencies from the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. This can only be done through the provision of suitable intermediary technologies such as a Service Oriented Architecture utilising application servers with integrated middleware providing solid support for existing application integration and future business process requirements. A solution capable of supporting complete business processes end to end will define winners more completely than solutions based around specific applications.