With so much emphasis given by the press and industry commentators on the new and the exciting, the possible and the future, it is sometimes easy to forget that the way forward will be built on the tried and tested, the here and now, Although over the last 25-30 years there has been much that has been considered revolutionary within IT infrastructures, there is far more that has been evolutionary. Evolution is the natural way forward, and when revolutionary comes under close scrutiny there is, in nearly every instance, a strong evolutionary element. Asked to name the greatest change within IT in the last three years, most respondents would highlight the growth of XML and Web services. Yet both these ‘radical’ changes that will impact the world of IT and business for many years to come have been built on proven technologies and models. XML evolved from SGML with HTML forming an important mid-point between the two. Web services are a natural evolution of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) technology, XML, component-based development (itself reliant on the understanding of the development and behaviour of objects), et al.