When artfully written and properly marketed, technology standards are both very boring pieces of literature and extremely effective ways of transforming an industry. There would be no Internet without IP, FTP and SMTP. There would be no database industry without SQL. And there will be no relief of pain within corporate IT groups without proper industry standards for reducing the complexity of IT systems by an order of magnitude at least.

Within this category, we will follow the progress of standards that we believe will have a profound impact on the way enterprise software gets developed in the future. Among them, BPMN, BPEL and most Web Services standards will form the focus of our attention.