Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: Five Predictions for 2006

Five Predictions for 2006

Now is the time that everyone comes out of the woodwork making their predictions for what will happen in 2006. Why should I be any different?

Here are my top five predictions...

Enterprise Service Bus: ServiceMix will actually become the number one most recommended enterprise service bus and will be listed in the leader position for both magic quadrants and wave reports. In fact, analysts will start listing non-commercial open source projects right next to commercial proprietary product offerings in order to bring integrity to the world of industry analysis

Liberty Alliance: Project Liberty will change its membership criteria and remove all membership fees for end-users (They will continue to charge software vendors) in order to further accelerate the need for federated identity within the marketplace. Industry analysts covering this space will then encourage folks in large enterprises to participate on these types of efforts since they no longer have to justify to the business why they are spending money on technology related consortiums. Oasis and the Object Management Group will follow the lead of Project Liberty in this regard.

Free Software and Open Source: Open Source visionary, Eric Raymond for a second time will be recruited by Microsoft and reject their offer, however he will instead become an industry analyst and use the opportunity to start educating corporate America about the benefits of open source. In this endeavor, he will partner with Richard Stallman. After all, many of the great analyst firms nowadays are simply two guys with a passion. In the meantime, Bruce Peren's company will be purchased by a very large vendor and he will change his perspective that closed source software is good for the economy.

Web 2.0:Many publishers will jump on the bandwagon commissioning authors to write books on Web 2.0 and they will all lose money because enterprises are now aware of all the hype and instead will stay focused on topics that matter to them such as Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures, J2EE, Enterprise Architecture and Web Services. Conferences on Web 2.0 will also lose their shirt.

Technology and Education: $100 laptop will not only be successful but will become $50 as many folks from corporate America will open their wallets as they understand the value proposition of educating folks in third-world countries can bring to their own bottom line. Bill Gates will personally fund deployment of these laptops for all school children in Trinidad.