To understand what all the fuss about Web services is, it's useful to start with a little history. As Forrest Gump's mother said, "You can't look forward without putting the past behind you."

So what have we all been doing this past decade?

First, we've made massive investments in systems that automate our company business processes. Sometimes we have connected them internally and sometimes we've connected them externally to our trading partners; usually we haven't done much of either. It's just too hard to justify and build the custom connections required to integrate all systems given the mosaic of data and technology and processes that have to be joined. So we've taken the approach, "Hook up the important ones; we'll tackle the rest later."

Second, we've obsessively embraced and exploited to an extraordinary degree the World Wide Web as an external layer to make our companies more attractive and accessible to our customers, suppliers, and employees. Despite the rise of "eSkepticism," nobody can dispute that this has changed forever all our expectations for the way we work together.

The rate of expansion of the Web has, however, definitely hit some natural speed bumps as the business environment has become more complex and business conditions have become tougher, with shorter product life cycles, pressure on margins, more outsourcing, more mergers, and more need for flexibility to compensate for world uncertainty.

At bottom, we are neither getting the most out of our legacy application investments nor is a browser-oriented Web taking full advantage of the power of available rich personal computers or the people who use them.

Looking Forward
Web services make discrete pieces of business logic and information programmatically available throughout the Web. Our personal computers become valuable consumers and integrators of these services and, just as the Web allows small businesses to project scale and global reach way beyond their size, these businesses will be able to assemble impressive capabilities from a few generic services and a laser focus on adding their own unique competence.

Knowledge and expertise can be exposed as a Web service - and there's no reason why every connectable computing device we own could not become a powerful consumer and useful producer of Web services. Following Metcalf's Law, the total value of the Web will grow exponentially with this increase in connections. So what is needed to unleash this potential?

From Web Sites to Web Services
The first variable of this enormous potential is standards. Many companies managed to create useful information-management and business tools on the Internet long before we all learned what WWW stood for, but the Web's expansion moved at warp speed only when it became possible for nontechnical users (my Mum and Dad) and relatively unsophisticated developers (me) to simply describe, locate, and connect to Web sites. This was all made possible, of course, by the ubiquity of hardware and software that implemented HTML, DNS, and HTTP: a standards-enabled revolution.

Now, as we have all grabbed XML as a way to create smart data, the equivalent early adoption is just starting. The real explosion, however, happens when it is again trivially easy to describe, locate, and connect to Web services. This is the promise of WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP, which are receiving unprecedented acceptance from all major software protagonists - including Intel.

After standards, we need tools. With an open architecture based on a few critical standards, it's possible to build tools that allow us to build, publish, and consume Web services using both the company's central computing resources and our own personal computing devices - at work, at home, in the office, on the road, when we're there, and when we're asleep.

With the right tools, the following scenarios will become commonplace:

• My home computer will pull financial information from my broker, my bank, and my employer into my money manager and let me know if I'm on my personal budget or spending like a drunken sailor.
• A buyer's laptop can keep track of stock and lead-time information in the factory as well as at suppliers, and then notify them of critical situations requiring individual intervention.
• A large insurance company can make its products accessible as a Web service that can be assembled into offers by banks, travel companies, car dealers.
• The three companies you just acquired can expose internally their financial and factory data as Web services so you can feed decision support and accounting systems without converting everyone to the corporate ERP system.

This is the realization of the true promise of the Web; the e-business Internet overflowing with opportunities to invent new ways to do business, increase productivity, and generate growth.

Author Bio:
Colin Evans is director of e-Business Solutions Lab at Intel Corporation's Intel Architecture Group. He's responsible for the development of solutions architecture and technology that support Intel's e-business strategy and the development of Intel's open e-business standards. He chairs the executive board of RosettaNet, a multicompany initiative focused on building Internet-based supply chains for information technology, electronic components, and the semiconductor manufacturing industries. He also chairs the board of directors at OASIS, an international consortium driving XML interoperability standards. colin.evans@intel.com