Web services are building blocks for creating open distributed systems, and allow companies and individuals to quickly and cheaply make their digital assets available worldwide. One early example is Microsoft Passport, a convenient authentication service hosted by Microsoft. A Web service can aggregate other Web services to provide a higher-level set of features. Applications of the future will be built from Web services that are dynamically selected at runtime based on their cost, quality, and availability. Web services are pretty much guaranteed to be at the heart of the next generation of distributed systems.
Any Web service can interact with any other Web service.
Therefore, any device which supports these technologies can both host and access Web services. Pretty soon, they will be present in phones, cars and even soda machines. No problem, the wireless-networked soda machine can contact the local supplier s Web service and order more of your favorite beverage. Low barrier to Entry . The concepts behind Web services are easy to understand and free toolkits from vendors like IBM and Microsoft allow developers to quickly create and deploy Web services.