Many attempts at distributed computing have been made using approaches such as Java RMI, CORBA, and DCOM etc. However, none of these is a clear winner when it comes to the interoperability in an environment of such diverse systems and platforms as the Internet. RMI requires Java at all communicating ends while DCOM works fine as long as we have Windows environments at all participating endpoints. These requirements straight away mark them as non-viable solutions. That leaves us with CORBA, which again requires compatible ORBs (Object Request Brokers) at the communicating ends and is not as easy to implement as RMI or DCOM. Another problem with these concepts is that the coupling between various components in a system is too tight to be effective for low-overhead, ubiquitous B2B e-business over the Internet. These approaches require too much agreement and shared context among business systems from different organizations to be reliable for open, low-overhead B2B e-business.

Monolithic systems like these are sensitive to change. A change in the output of one of the subsystems will often cause the whole system to break. A switch to a new implementation of a subsystem will also often cause old, statically bound collaborations, which unintentionally relied on the side effects of the old implementation, to break down. This situation is manageable to a certain extent through skills and numbers of people. As scale, demand, volume, and rate of business change increases, this brittleness becomes exposed. Any significant change in any one of these aspects will cause the brittleness of the systems to become a crisis. For example, unavailable or unresponsive Web sites lack of speed to market with new products and services, inability to rapidly shift to new business opportunities, or competitive threats. IT organizations will not be able to cope with changes because of the coupling and the dynamics of the Web makes management of these brittle architectures untenable.

Thus, the current trend in the application development is moving away from tightly coupled monolithic systems and towards systems of loosely coupled, dynamically bound components. Systems built with these principles are more likely to dominate the next generation of e-business systems, with flexibility being the overriding characteristic of their success. It is expected that applications will be based on compositions of services discovered and marshalled dynamically at runtime. Application integration becomes the innovation of the next generation of e-business, as businesses move more of their existing IT applications to the Web, taking advantage of e-portals and e-marketplaces and leveraging new technologies. This is where Web Services come into the picture.

The concept of Web Services is a view of what the next generation of e-business architectures for the Web will look like. The Web Services architecture describes principles for creating dynamic, loosely coupled systems based on services, but no single implementation. There are many ways to instantiate a Web Service by choosing various implementation techniques for the roles, operations, and so on described by the Web Services architecture.