Service-oriented architecture
Knowledge of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will prepare students to work in the real world. Most companies are looking into transforming their architecture to an SOA based architecture these days in order to be able to handle changes in the business without much impact to investements. SOA offers a way to integrate unlike hardware and software ecosystem enabling them to interact across platforms, technology and geography in a standard way. There are also open source projects that provide SOA solutions, for example Apache Tuscany at http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany/. There is plenty of room to innovate and learn in this space to get students ready for the real world.