The future of software will involve some type of service-oriented architecture; this is an assumption in this book. With such an architecture, we will see more packaged software used either as an internal service or an external service available over the Internet. We will connect these services together to create the information technology systems of the future. These systems will require less custom software in organizations and more creativity in the connections between the services. This is a natural evolution of software technology and will be explained further in this book.

No crystal ball exists to tell us the services that will be available. Undoubtedly, there will many innovative services that we cannot envision at this time. For that reason, this book presents relatively straightforward data-centric and distributed process approaches that will help you get your organization ready to take advantage of a service-oriented architecture in whatever form it takes.

The first part of this book begins with a story that illustrates how a service-oriented architecture and Web Services might be used for planning and taking a business trip in the not-too-distant future. Following the story, the next chapter outlines a...