A Look at the Future: 2012 Middleware Trends, Part 2

We recently posted the first part of an interview with Red Hat’s Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, middleware business and Ashesh Badani, senior director, middleware business, addressing upcoming trends for 2012. In this second part of the interview, Muzilla and Badani touch on an array of additional topics, including the growing call for middleware-based standards, integration with cloud services, middleware and mobile and more.

What do you think will be some of the biggest pain points for enterprises in 2012?

Ashesh Badani:

Something we've been hearing consistently is the need to scale businesses. Organizations are growing as the economy continues to grow; however, organizations need to scale without increasing fixed costs.

Enterprises continue to express interest in more standards-based, open technologies. CIOs are focused on avoiding vendor lock-in, and we expect to see increased interest in technologies like Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP). But at the same time, there are concerns about keeping data secure. Organizations want to be flexible enough to easily integrate their various systems, but not at the cost of security.

Speaking of standards – and specifically AMQP – it sounds like you see support for those initiatives continuing to grow?

Craig Muzilla:

Absolutely. As you know, AMQP is now official and has received a great amount of support from Red Hat. We're also seeing significant interest for a standards-based wire protocol in industries like financial services and transportation. People are tired of proprietary messaging protocols.

HTML 5 is also seeing greater adoption, especially as a standard to support mobile applications. The benefit of HTML 5 is that it provides the richness of an application but also offers greater portability across various mobile platforms.

Another standard that is receiving increased attention is Business Process Model and Notation 2 (BPMN2). This standard has made a place for itself amidst other technologies, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

Badani:

We're also seeing a lot of discussion around cloud standards. We've been doing a fair amount of work in this area and, although the market is still young, expect to see more standards starting to mature here.

Do you see any changes in the ways that middleware works with cloud initiatives?

Badani:

I expect a lot of changes with cloud computing next year and beyond. There will be more requirements to ensure that data is secure, tighter integration between middleware and cloud computing and greater