The first meetings in Beijing have been quite informative. SOA, BPM, even BI and CEP are on the minds of IT executives, integrators, and analysts here. Even had a spirited discussion of virtualization and cloud computing at the analyst firm CCID Monday afternoon.

Yet existing side to this leading-edge mentality is the fact that much of China's IT industry was still thinking of "hardware vs. software" until very recently. Brand-name hardware was the highest priority, and "only recently have executives thought that software is the important thing that will make a difference," according to several people with whom I spoke.

The reason for this seeming incongruity is speed. The China market is simply growing too fast for people to sit back and analyze change. I actually heard the term "paradigm shift" today. Not surprising for an IT market that is expected to "slow" to 14% growth this year, with enterprise IT software pegged at 30% growth. I heard these numbers several times.

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