Open standards and open source are coming together to define a Web Services platform. Web Services represents a merging of IT infrastructure with object oriented programming, deploying network-accessible objects on the web. SOAP is an XML-based messaging model that can link applications from any operating system, on any computer, in any programming language. WSDL describes the SOAP access to objects and allows for rapid integration with the new object assembly tools. Want to find new services? You can find these on the web by searching the UDDI Registry.

We'll start by briefly introducing these technologies, then discuss a few case studies that show how IBM customers are deploying these new technologies to become web service providers, focussing on the problems that can be solved in the new model.