I often get asked by the research community this question: "what are the hot topics and promising research possibilities in the area of software architecture?" 

From the perspective of a practicing software architect, these are three typical pains of enterprises:

- building interoperable solutions across heterogeneous environments

- gaining confidence in the scalability and reliability of implementations of advanced web services features such as ws-security, ws-transactions

- online identity management, architecting and incorporating methods for eliminating identity theft/phishing attacks

At the same time, I'm also seeing a lot of interesting potentials of 'building the next biggest thing on Web 2.0' that potentially can take us away from these traditional enterprise challenges, and potentially revolutionise the way we do things. To start off with:

- 'location based mashups/applications' is finding applications all over the place, see these examples

- new interaction styles

- new visualisation enablers

not to mention the new business models and potentials that brings about.

So - if you're a researcher who's looking to solve enterprises' current challenges - sure you can get very busy helping them with coming up with the right approach/tools to solving their interoperability/security etc challenges; alternatively - I think all the fast paced Web 2.0 related innovation is very exciting too - where the sky's the limit!

I would love to see the research community to take the lead in coming up with the next biggest thing on Web 2.0!