Web services have emerged as the leading technology for service-oriented architectures. Web-service related standards, particularly SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, have received unprecedented support from major vendors. Web services solutions differ from prior technologies in that they expose a machine-readable description, written in a language widely used for many purposes, that, at least in theory, allows use of a service without knowing ahead of time the exact format for doing so. Furthermore, the concept of "service" is extremely extensible. With web services, critical functions such as security, reliability, performance/scalability, provisioning, management and orchestration can be built as services themselves, and services are easily and generally consumable by other services.

The Enterprise Opportunity: There is growing evidence that business process architectures and the supporting IT architectures will evolve into service-oriented architectures, enabling companies to achieve both greater efficiencies throughout their value network and greater flexibility in responding to market demands. In particular, web services technologies are likely to be widely-adopted. This will, as a first effect, introduce new efficiencies into business transactions, and provide an opportunity for new middleware services. There are at least three categories of enterprise adoption for web services technology as follows:

Establish and Automate Self-service Processing. Companies may be expected to establish and automate self-service processing in an effort to reduce costs through more efficient transactions such as order status and "available to promise" (ATP). Most enterprises deploying these solutions are doing so on top of their existing B2B investments and view web services as a complementary rather than replacement technology.

Increase the Number of Trading Partners for Existing Services. Companies will migrate to a services-oriented architecture (SOA) with existing trading partners in order to lower the costs of process integration and get a better ROI on their eBusiness investment. At the same time, even existing web services lower the barrier to working with new partners. Future dynamic integration, and commodization of services, will make it possible to find new suppliers as needed.

Develop New Business Services. The Companies can also use web services to create a new line of business based upon enabling access to core intellectual property that is offered as an outsourced service to new trading partners.