“2008 will see even more frenetic activity and interest around SOA, but there are still issues and problems to be addressed that will hold back majority adoption for another year.” So suggests Lustratus Research, an infrastructure software market analyst and consultancy, in its 2008 Predictions for the SOA and Integration Marketplace.

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Listen up compliance officers. Your life is about to get trickier. You’re about to be bypassed. You might as well throw in the towel now. Sure, you can keep hold of all those corporate emails and instant messages, lock down the desktops of your employees and block their access to websites, but in this increasingly mobile online world it’s going to be pretty impossible to keep control of your flocks and how they interact in the 2.0 cyber world.

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A couple of weeks back, the UK rock group Radiohead put its latest album up for sale on its website (ingeniously on a “pay what it’s worth” basis) and the demand was so great that its website promptly crashed. Nice idea guys, shame about the execution.

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This column is being written in San Francisco. I’m in town to attend the second running of the Office 2.0 conference, which kicks off tomorrow. It’s very much a Silicon Valley event - vendors, venture capitalists, lawyers and maybe even a user or two. But with 500 plus paying delegates and a host of sponsors, the buzz is already mounting. All the delegates were given an iPhone (to keep) as part of a collaboration experiment (I am collaborating by sharing a special iMix music playlist that I programmed for the event).

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Wherever I go these days, I hear the term “carbon footprint”. Being environmentally conscious is a new checkmark on the scorecard of most global companies, including those in the financial markets.

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Escaping the mayhem of the recent SIFMA trade show at New York’s Hilton, I walked a few blocks to the trendy Dream Hotel, to view a demo of technology that could not only redefine desktop deployments, but also give a boost to grid computing.

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Most would agree that open source technology can drive down costs of implementation and support, although many say this misses the bigger picture of open source adoption. To them, the rapid deployment and innovation that open source offers are the real benefits.

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We all know that Wall Street is about performance. In these days of low latency everything, it’s all about doing things faster. Once upon a time, the focus was simply on opting for the fastest processor available, and upgrading as soon as a faster model came along. This approach worked up to a point – until it became harder and harder for the chip manufacturers to make their silicon run any faster without catching fire!

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In A-Team’s latest research, Faster Than a Speeding Bullet – Low Latency Architectures and Building Blocks For Tomorrow’s Trading Applications, we made some predictions, and one of them was: “Basic functions such as datafeed handlers, in-memory databases, messaging middleware and data fabrics will become increasingly commoditised.”

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To many on Wall Street, mention open source and they will immediately equate it with Linux. There’s no doubt that the open source operating system has been a big hit in the financial markets. It was in the right place at the right time as firms were looking to write off their investments in expensive Sun boxes and replace them with cheap x86-based blades.

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When one thinks of technology suppliers in the SOA and Web Services world, it’s names of heavyweights like IBM, HP, BEA and Microsoft that spring readily to mind, followed perhaps by the upstarts, such as WS02, Active Endpoints and Parasoft.

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As Service Oriented Architectures have become increasingly in vogue for building applications, attention has turned to the tools that might be used to create and deploy them.

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In the old days there was middleware. The likes of IBM and Tibco made a fortune from selling products to Wall Street to integrate disparate systems, to hook up front and back offices, connect to clearing houses, trade with customers et cetera.

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