Predominant among these announcements is their enhanced capabilities on the business process side, as well as new capabilities for connecting business partners and enhanced modeling.

And so, we'll have to see what wins the tug-of-war: greater vendor choice through interoperability and loose coupling, or reduced vendor selection for purposes of efficiency.

It looks like the market and customers have compelled IBM to release its own ESB-branded product as a way of offsetting the increasing noise and competition in the space for those sorts of products.

In IBM's case, they repackaged their enterprise messaging capabilities together with some business process capabilities and standards-based interfaces and made it lightweight to craft their entry-level ESB.

I do see Eclipse eating away at the non-Microsoft IDE environment, but I think that it doesn't threaten Microsoft's IDE at all.

Going forward, I think there's little incentive for companies to create new IDEs, and even for many companies with proprietary IDEs to continue developing them in the face of what's becoming increasingly and more widely accepted as a 'universal' IDE for non-Microsoft environments.

We see very rapid consolidation in this market.