Seats are limited.
As eBusiness implementations mature, the need for integrated data access and management will become increasingly acute. Among the many facilities for providing integrated access to enterprise data at various levels, XML and virtual DBMS products are most suitable when the requirement is for providing coherent management of data from multiple sources. It seems probable that over time, these two technologies will converge. Either native XML content management will become a dimension of virtual DBMS functionality or vice versa. One unanswered question is whether these technologies will become allied with application servers and enterprise DBMSs or subsumed by those technologies.