This IDC study identifies and discusses the top 10 trends that IDC believes will have a material impact on the application development and deployment markets during 2007 and 2008. These trends speak to key events occurring in information and data management, application development software, business process integration and deployment, application life-cycle management, and service oriented architecture.

The top trends discussed in this document tend to show a technology bias. This is very evident in our discussion of virtualization, SOA, application design, and EDA. Consequently, seven of our top 10 trends are technology driven. This focus on technology is expected, since AD&D is often the test bed for technologies. The technologies that survive the rigors of AD&D often go on and are reflected in packaged applications. Such is the case with composite application development.

Our discussion of open source stands out because it is not technology driven but business model driven instead. OSS is far from a mature space, and there are many exciting dimensions of OSS that may help ISVs reinvent how they address ecosystems, customer communities, account control, and their role as a software broker. This is one of the reasons we elected to use the term disruptive to describe the potential impact that OSS could have.

"Market forces, including open source software, service oriented architecture, IT governance, and virtualization, are having a profound impact on application development and deployment," said Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president for Application Development and Deployment research at IDC. "However, the increasing rate of technological change continues to present new opportunities for start-ups, resulting in prospects for continued growth in the coming years."