Unification, integration, clustering, connectivity. These are words found commonly in enterprise IT and in this issue of WebSphere Journal. Picking up on last month's Non-Theme theme, we continue to provide you with a variety of articles that cover many parts of the application development ground, all made possible through the use of WebSphere.

As stated here previously (and obviously), we live in times of tremendous heterogeneity in most enterprise IT departments. We also live in times of industry rhetoric that borders on the political, sometimes with religious-sounding overtones. Whether an environment or approach is "open" is subject to severe debate, most of it self-serving.

Yet beneath the rhetoric lies the technical reality of designing, deploying, and maintaining applications, and IT developers and managers tend not to listen to the hype but simply ask what a technology can do and how well will it be supported.

We were reminded again recently of WebSphere's burgeoning dominance in many aspects of the markets it serves, with the release of an IDC report that "concludes that IBM Global Services is a leading global market maker for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)."

Although this report's overview did not provide any market-share information, it pointed out that IBM's "leadership in SOA is attributed to a company-wide strategy, deep vertical industry expertise and Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), a unique methodology that aligns an SOA to a customer's business goals and directly ties business processes to underlying software applications that support them."

Although WebSphere and SOA, let alone application development and SOA, are not interchangeable terms, it is interesting to note that Blue has taken the lead in a very hot, very leading-edge of the market against serious competitors and an open-source community that is moving aggressively to tout itself as the answer to enterprise IT in the 21st century.

Combine the results of the IDC study with results reported by Gartner and others that show WebSphere taking the clear leadership position in the web services application development market worldwide, and you can see that IBM is helping enterprises make as much sense as possible out of the tasks developers face.

The polyglot nature of enterprise IT in most companies can give the impression that things are more messed up than they are. Because, despite the diversity of platforms, operating systems and environments, and application development approaches, it looks as if a significant number of people have found a solution that works for them within the world of WebSphere.

This issue of WebSphere Journal presents some pieces of the overall puzzle, as does every issue of the magazine, and we hope you enjoy working your way through the serious and eclectic variety of features presented here. As always, send us your story ideas, your stories (good and bad) about working with WebSphere, and your comments on the issue.