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There has been much talk about the maturing of the IT business lately. Suppliers, it has been noted, aren't just growing more slowly than they used to, and are consolidating, but they are behaving better. They are more cautious in making their claims, they deliver better value for money, they are more customer aware, and they are certainly co-operating with each other as never before.

But nobody grows up overnight, and for a few days last month, the industry once again demonstrated that it is living up to its clichéd image - hype-driven, fast moving, complicated and perennially reinventing itself.

At the Gartner Group's European conference on integration and web services, for example, analysts introduced the idea of the 'Event Driven Architecture'. One of them warned: 'This will be the subject of conferences in the next few years. This will be the cover theme of magazines'.

And he was right: jumping in ahead of the wave, the event-driven enterprise is the subject of this month's cover story. And, as this article explains, once again businesses are being given the imperative: if you don't do it, you will suffer serious financial and strategic consequences. And once again, they are being told they must spend some money in order to make, or at least save, some.

In promoting what it openly and perhaps ironically calls the 'next big thing', Gartner was conscious of the fact that the last next big thing - the Service Oriented Archit-ecture (SOA) - is barely off the drawing board. Most customers are thinking about it, not doing it. This month's Q&A with British American Tob-acco, a company that is deploying an SOA, demonstrates that even this technology is in its infancy.

Coincidentally, it was during that same Gartner conference that news broke of Microsoft's tentative - and ultimately unsuccessful - move to buy Europe's largest software company, SAP (see Company Analysis).

This was another sign that the industry is still maturing, in ungainly teenage jumps. But it also demonstrates, very clearly, that the sweetest place to be in software right now is in the middle and at the top. That is, in enterprise class applications and middleware, driving and managing the new architectures like SOA and EDA. So attractive is this area that Gartner is even predicting new entrants into the market.

Potential buyers should read carefully and beware.