Here's some update from the ninja hideout on catapult:

The architecture may not seem to mean anything for those who do not understand system architecture. But this is what it means. Many systems designed for the Internet are based on the famous tiered web architecture. It provides for greater performance and security.

In trying to achieve maximum throughput, the design of the catapult is broken into application specific modules or servers. A new layer of API servers is added so that it can allow the entire network to scale in both directions, i.e.,providing high throughputs (queries/s as well as tx/s through the API servers) while it also allows the backend network to scale independently.

The all new catapult network at the backend is where the blockchaining is. The whole idea of this type of configuration is to independently scale the API (the number of clients) and the blockchain (data replication / security). This sort of configuration allows for enterprise class deployment. They not only comply with industry practice, they also take NEM's blockchain technology one notch up by being able to scale the number of transactions to thousands per sec. Initial results have been most promising. But the ninja boys are sharpening their wares to make it transact at even higher throughputs.

World class and bleeding edge in Blockchain technology design. Most promising indeed!