This paper focuses on the movement of online catalogue in the international market with reference to fusions and alliances and the birth of new technological models. The economic and technological factors cause significant changes that not only do they influence the user but also they have a great impact on our profession. This paper analyses the surveys run by ARL and Library Journal in order to point out the gaps of our national system due to the lack of a serious analysis of the OPAC Italian market. Software producer are no longer able to offer the most updated products and the OPAC system is damaged by this situation because innovation in the OPAC system, especially Information Retrieval (IR) technology, has stopped. Except for a few exceptions, the situation in Italy is quite the same. While, in other countries, software producers have developed innovative solutions and new technological models for the OPAC of the new generation which are integrated in their software with the client/server system and which provide interoperability and integration with the other tools of the web.