The whole rationale is being driven by the consumer. They want the whole home solution with the best and easiest to use technology.

We've reached a point where integration into a home entertainment platform will be both viable and attractive to customers and we expect to see rapid convergence between pay-TV penetration in the marketplace and broadband penetration.

As is very often the case, the smart card is a solution designed more for the benefit of the financial institution than it is for the consumer.

XML by itself is not a solution -- it's a key ingredient to enable a richer type of solution, ... What you need is an architecture where you can take XML data and integrate it with various applications -- and that's what we're offering with BizTalk.

Since we chose HSI as our point-of-sale solution over six years ago, the HSI level of service and responsiveness has been excellent. The HSI software was able to manage the transaction volume a property of our size generates into a single database solution, which has proved to be both reliable and efficient.

RIM makes a healthy monthly profit per subscriber, and anyone who thinks they can provide 80% of the solution and capture some portion of the market that RIM is going after will give it a try. But I don't think there's anything more ominous here than what's already available from Good or Microsoft.