Management consultancy McKinsey recently forecast that 2007 will be characterised by an increasing migration to SOAs and the introduction of "lean" manufacturing principles in data centre operations. Research among US chief information officers indicates that 64 per cent of large organisations plan to implement SOAs in the coming year. This is a huge potential market for channel partners but the success of these projects will rely upon a strong foundation that partners will need to check is in place.

End users looking to exploit SOA as a set of building blocks that can adapt to changes in business process, will need to be able to dynamically adapt and modify the underlying infrastructure to meet workload requirements and deliver tight integration between the application and the underlying hardware.