All huffing and puffing aside, the value of Web services today can be boiled down to one major benefit: easier integration across platforms.

Basically, Microsoft and IBM have succeeded in cajoling the industry into agreeing on a few XML protocols, which together provide a common denominator for exchanging XML messages. But that common denominator is extremely low. The basic Web services protocols say nothing about how Web services might work together to emulate the complicated interactions that occur among enterprise applications--or among different enterprises that want to collaborate in a supply chain, engage in ongoing B2B e-commerce, share customers or vendors, and so on.

For Web services to support that kind of complexity, new standards will need to be derived from the world of business process management (BPM), which combines elements of workflow software, enterprise application integration (EAI), and graphical modeling of business processes. Ideally, you model processes by dragging and dropping objects and hooking them up, while, under the hood, code is generated that enables Web services to talk to each other according to rules embedded in the model.

"Web services are cool, but you've got to be able to string them together," says David McCoy, the Gartner Group's vice president of BPM. "One way of stringing them together is with a BPM tool."

BPM software has its roots in EAI, where such leaders as Tibco, WebMethods, Vitria, and IBM (in its MQSeries middleware) all offer BPM capability as part of their integration offerings. Microsoft is also a player. Its BizTalk Server combines an XML integration server with Visio-based graphical modeling--and underneath, generates XML Language (XLang), Microsoft's business process language.

XLang is one of several business process languages with a shot at becoming part of the Web services stack. Drawing on its work with MQSeries, IBM has developed the Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), while Sun and BEA are promoters of the Business Process Modeling Language. And, finally, ebXML has its own business process specifications.

Rumor has it that IBM and Microsoft may be collaborating on a hybrid of XLang and WSFL. That would make sense for a several reasons: IBM has proposed WSFL as a Web services standard from the start; Microsoft and IBM have already collaborated on Web services security standards; and XLang is actually an extension of WSDL, one of the three basic Web services protocols. And, of course, muscling a BPM standard into the Web services stack would be yet another opportunity for Microsoft and IBM to marginalize Sun and the protocols it favors.

However the politics play out, using BPM to raise the common denominator is essential to the future of Web services. The ultimate goal of Web services is to abstract business logic from the platform it runs on, where each business process can be a reusable, interchangeable part. In a vast, interconnected matrix of component-base applications, the more standards-based parts you can reuse and recombine, the better. No doubt these standards will take years to evolve. As they do, Web services will start living up to the high expectations the industry has raised.

Have you tried existing BPM applications? Did they work for you? Why or why not? E-mail Eric or TalkBack below.