Australians take great pride in being early adopters of technology, embracing everything from DVDs to mobile phones and Hannah Montana at breakneck pace after their introduction. The same has proved true when it comes to implementing SOA, although the term may not have been used at first, as people usually spoke of Web services instead.

Experimentation with Web services grew out of the gargantuan effort to upgrade or replace systems threatened by the dread Millennium Bug, which was actively addressed in Australia through high-level government efforts that saw the replacement of many legacy systems.

Don't tell French CIOs that SOA is a new paradigm for developing applications and architecturing information systems. They'd tell you : "I've been doing SOA for the last 20 or 30 years."

Is this true? Well, yes and no. When it comes to architectural design, we've got a great tradition in France. You may have heard about Merise, for instance, the French analytical methodology for conceiving and developing enterprise IT systems (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merise_(informatique).

Germany has developed the typical love-hate relationship with SOA that we usually develop towards new (business) trends coming from the U.S. There are a variety of reasons for it. First and foremost, there is the slightly different cultural and educational approach. In the U.S., the minute a new idea has been spoken, people abandon the ship of the old idea and flock towards to new way of doing things. German students, on the other hand, like others in Europe, are trained to prove a concept by disproving the hypothesis. Thus, our natural instinct to any new idea is "it won't work" and we need to try to prove that. Only when that proof fails will be start to believe that the new thing may be a good idea.

Romania became part of the European Union (EU) on January 1, 2007, a fact that has opened new opportunities for foreign investment in this country. Since its integration into the EU, Romania has become an attractive place to foreign investitors. Investors are drawn by a number of economic and social factors.