The promise of digital business is to usher in an unprecedented convergence of people, business and things, blurring the boundaries between the digital world and the physical world and creating new revenue opportunities in its wake. This convergence introduces a disruptive element into strategic planning also for application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) providers. Event processing, in-memory computing, cloud and pervasive integration will be the key driving forces that will reshape the AIM market, while vendors will continue to bundle software products and look at cloud-based delivery models to meet the new and more articulated market demands.

• How application infrastructure and middleware projects are becoming the cornerstone of the digital business
• How spending is starting to shift from traditional AIM products to newer offerings, such as platform as a service (PaaS), low-latency messaging, complex event processing and in-memory data grids
• How the idea of integrated business, where not only applications or processes are interconnected, but also sensors and things, is changing the AIM marketplace