XML Web Services have become the universal standard for integration of legacy applications, and business-to-business communications.
Open and flexible enough to transfer any kind of information, they have also been designed to run comfortably on top of the all-pervasive internet backbone.
This combination of flexibility and all-pervasive reach is the gateway to a whole new world of information sharing, and business productivity.
From a purely business perspective, Web Services make ca$h $en$e.
Here are some examples of how this works:
B-2-B integration: You can connect up your main customer's ordering systems to interact directly with your own, eliminating the need for staffing order units, reducing paper copy, increasing efficiency of order response, automating the your own supplier requests, in short making radical increases to your business throughput for less cost.
Service agregation: You can combine power of commerically available web services to create your own repackaged aggregate service. For example, combine Google's location maps with Amazon's product webservices you could allow people see all the products on amazon that have a relevance to a place they are viewing on Google.
Service sharing: A good example of this is credit card payment processing, which can be easily added to any web site by subscribing to web services that support this functionality.
Selling automated services: From the other side, you yourself can become a service provider, and charge customers for providing software services and information which they can incorporate into their own information infrastructures.
Integration between existing infrastructure applications: On a much more local scale, this same integration technology can be used to bring together disparate applications that already exist within your company. Finally you can get your marketing system to integrate seamlessly with your accounting system, and produce reports that bring together information from diverse sources without the need for intervention by staff members.
XML Web Services