'We do not want to tell customers what applications to use. We will only ensure that any application a company wants to deploy will be able to interact with its operating system,' says Ruthven.

Manoj Bhoola, server & tools business group manager at Microsoft SA, believes that Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) will not be around as it currently is in the future, and notes that integration will become more of a network and hardware layer instance.

'Through BizTalk Server we are looking at the connectors and are bundling a whole lot of them, like SAP, Oracle and many other connectors in there. We are focusing on Business Process Management (BPM), which goes a step further than simple EAI. BPM allows for more processing and provides more workflow into the integration layer over many systems,' Bhoola says.

Bhoola believes also believes that there is still a space for middleware, apart from simple messaging, and notes that development of middleware should be focused on functionality.

Middleware vendors have to up their game in the functionality of their products to add value to customers, as the competition will warm up, following the fact that integration languages will be standardized and not a differential anymore.