Before my presentation at our quarterly ISV Community Days had a rather long discussion staying in a circle of ISV techies. To the left was PM from one of the ERP vendor who're doing Remoting and to the right stayed Web-services guy with process automation...

The main driving factors here are: Customers (support of different product versions) Competitors Technology trends Legacy code (extensive approach of adding functionality) Little or none on-site customization during deployment Support of different databases...