Furthermore, the research company says, increasing attention is being paid toward application integration technology coming from business application vendors, which push their technology to their established customer base, thus reducing the opportunities available for the traditional market players.

IBM Business development manager for SAO and open standards, Joe Ruthven, says users should first look at what middleware is, before tackling the debate on the technology's extinction.

Ruthven says: 'Looking at the application environment dealing with databases, user log-on, security and messaging middleware vendors ended up with various scenarios and a big mess.' Each developer has its own way of doing things, and this has made the integration of middleware much more complicated.

Jan Dijkstra, principal consultant at Oracle SA, says: 'The intelligent network will most definitely impact on some of the messaging aspects of middleware, but the middleware space is much broader than just messaging.'

Dijkstra says that performance of middleware is based on standardization and key to its performance is that standards not change too often. He believes that the intelligent networks of tomorrow will assist in the standardization process, and adds that XML and Web services are becoming the de facto standards in protocols.