It has been an interesting year. 

The economic turmoil has hit economies and is causing worldwide uncertainty. This can already be seen in integration projects - delays in decisions and reconsiderations of project scopes. It is not the easiest decision to invest in business process development when the uncertainty is affecting the whole value network including customers, vendors and partners.

However, integration solutions typically have two purposes - development and optimization. In good times, the focus is pretty much on development side; creating new applications, developing new business processes, expanding into new business areas. On uncertain or bad times the focus tends to shift naturally to optimization; utilizing existing assets to maximum, streamlining manual processes and increasing automation on applicable areas. But organizations that have the courage to take the risk of continuing business process development on times like these tend to be the ones who ride the wave when the economy is back on track. It will be interesting to see how organizations will utilize the possibilities of systems integration in the coming year.

On the technology side, Microsoft has shown its commitment to SOA platform development. With the announcements around "Dublin" and continuing development of "Oslo" set of modeling techniques, Microsoft platform will be even more interesting SOA platform in the future. What will be the roles and responsibilities between "Dublin"-boosted Windows Server and BizTalk Server - the current choice of SOA and integration platform - will remain a question mark, but these questions will most probably be answered in the coming months. And with Microsoft's continuing strong investments to Software + Services, including Azure platform, it will be interesting to see how software and solution vendors - such as Frends - will increase their investments into S+S.

Lots of questions with possibly very interesting answers. Anyways, on behalf of the whole Frends Architect team,

Happy new year 2009!!