I look back at the past year and realize that everything changed and nothing changed in 2005.

Mergers and acquisitions in the telecom industry created behemoth new carriers intent on rebuilding themselves into pre-1982 versions of AT&T. IPOs such as Google's rekindled 1990's delusions of grandeur in venture capitalists and Internet start-ups. And Cisco reversed Copernicus by embracing the concept that it and the network are at the center of the IT world.

But enough of the past - what will 2006 bring? Let's look at what might happen within each network segment - corporate, small and midsize business (SMB), and service provider.

The corporate segment will see the continuing advance of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations.Two SOA initiatives that will allow application virtualization to occur across a network will come into formal being as standards in 2006.

A service-component architecture that provides a model for constructing and assembling networks of services, and service objects that provide for common access to data are mandatory to make corporate SOAs into a multivendor reality. Databases have been stuck in an SQL rut for two decades.

XML Databases and XQuery are set to reengineer information storage and processing in 2006. Corporate networks will become not just vehicles for business but the nervous system of the extended corporation, linking diverse IT business applications or components together into efficient business processes.

Data centers will begin to change into data-center area networks clustering next-generation 10G Ethernet backplane blade servers in 2006. It is here that one of the major corporate network battles will be fought. If Cisco is correct, servers and storage will be interconnected into an intelligent network using their virtualization- and application-optimizing switches through dumb pipes such as Remote Direct Memory Access. If the IT industry is correct, interconnection will occur using high-performance, low-latency Ethernet switching, with optimization and virtualization intelligence occurring in the servers and the storage.

IT infrastructure vendors such as IBM realize that differentiation means optimized software execution or information retrieval speed, not raw hardware power. As an example, more embedded networking assist technology must become part of IBM's hardware and software offerings.