Most of the early noise about web services involved consumer-based offerings on websites. But by far the biggest market for web services is in the business sector, where firms can realistically look forward to being able to share information. Information that was previously impossible to distribute, both internally and with business partners.
Jupiter, an American research company, reported that 82% of companies surveyed in 2002 were already using web services of one kind or another. Most of them as part of pilot projects; and the web services market is inevitably being hyped as hard as its b2b predecessors.
Web services may or may not turn out to be the salvation of e-commerce, but they will at least tell us whether its proponents have learned anything from the harsh lessons of the last two years.
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