Predictions for 2007

Okay its time to don my cap of predictions for 2007, the following should be thought about as reliable as the average horoscope, i.e. I'm making them up off the top of my head.

Products and vendors

1. First off 2007 will the year of the SOA technical "platform" not exactly news as quite a few people are claiming this today, but 2007 will be the year that really sees this become useful. With Oracle, BEA and IBM all looking like having pretty major releases next years its going to be an entertaining marketplace.
2. Smaller vendors will struggle even more, the justifications for picking niche products will increase.
   
3. The "rich and fat" ESB model will die on its arse. Products will start to clearly split the communications infrastructure from the application infrastructure.
4. Microsoft will slip further behind in the enterprise space while they wait for Longhorn server
5. IBM will finally admit that it does have a cohesive strategy based around J2EE and that the non-J2EE bits are going to EOL.
6. Rumours of BEA being bought out by Chelsea FC will abound, then die away once Roman Abramovich realises they don't posses a top quality international striker.
7. SCA will become the "accepted" enterprise way of doing things
8. REST will be delivered into the stacks so they can remain buzzword compliant, REST advocates will denounce them both as heretics and as proof that REST is the "answer".
   
9. Business level modelling will continue to be a pipe dream, filled either with overly complex tools or insanely technical ones.
10. Oracle will buy some more companies, probably including some sort of registry
    
11. IBM will buy some more companies, probably focused around provisioning and management
    
12. Windows Workflow exploits will show up in the wild
13. Some product vendors will finally get the difference between product and application interfaces and stop confusing the two.
14. Questions will be asked about why you have to pay so much money for an invoicing process in an ERP.
15. Java being Open Sourced will not be the big "wow" that Slashdot predicted
16. ERP vendors will start to get their heads around SaaS licensing models
17. Hardware virtualisation will become the "norm" for new deployments
    

WS-*

1. WS-Contract and WS-SLA will remain in the future while WS-* concentrates on more technical challenges.
2. WS-* will continue to be plagued by insanely simple bugs in various implementations, but vendors will hopefully each have just one WS stack (rather than all having multiples like they do now).
3. BPEL 2.0 will go up a hype curve like almost no technology in history... people will then complain about their visual COBOL applications being unmaintainable.
4. WS-* will split into competing factions, those that think everything must be done in "pure" WS-*, and those that think that sometimes its okay to not use the standard way if its actually simpler.

REST

1. REST will start re-creating the sorts of things that WS-* has, so await "RESTful security" and "RESTful reliability" as well as "RESTful resource descriptions" being bandied about.
2. REST will aim for a MIME type explosion, this won't get very far and lead to lots of "local" standards that are nothing of the sort.
3. REST will split into competing factions, those that hold to the "literal truth" of the REST paper, and a more progressive sect who treat it as a series of recommendations that are to be applied with thought.

IT/Business

1. IT will continue to not care about the TCO and will focus on the cost of development
2. Some major IT horror stories will emerge based on SOA and REST "failures" the reality will be that the project was screwed from the start but it was a damned fine scapegoat
3. More engineering and measurable solutions will be required by the business
4. Business will demand more visible value from IT
5. Offshoring will continue, and South America will rise further as an offshore location
6. The business will want to see IT clearly split the utility from the value
7. IT will continue to focus on technical details and miss the business big picture
   

Well that is it for starters like all good horoscopes there are some specific elements that won't come true and a bunch of generalities that I can claim did. But my big prediction for 2007?

1. Sun will finally get their act together and pull all those brilliant minds into a cohesive enterprise strategy and ditch all the fan-boy bells and whistles that have dogged their recent past.

Well I can dream can't I?

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