As the industry continues to address the age-old problem of integration, the concept of the virtual enterprise is gaining momentum.

In a keynote presentation at the Gartner Web Services and Application Integration Summit here, analyst Roy Schulte provided some perspective on how far application integration has come in the last 15 years and what we can expect to see in the next five, including more movement toward virtualization.

"We're about halfway through the integration revolution," Schulte said. "Traditionally, we used to build applications first and do integration later. Now we think more systematically and strategically about our applications."

But while there has been a move away from monolithic application silos toward service-oriented architectures (SOAs), we are still getting stuck developing stovepipe applications, Schulte said. The only difference now is that they are SOA stovepipes.