What's the most pervasive element of information technology's future that most of us know the least about? My guess would be Web services, that transparent aspect of computing that will become increasingly critical to the smooth operation of just about everything. It's critical, but its very transparency makes it difficult to nail down and understand.

Essentially, the field of Web services is a necessary business response to the communications revolution created by the Internet. Through the Web, we communicate with people and organisations world-wide; but we've all run into problems opening or downloading media or even reading e-mails at times. Imagine, then, the difficulties faced by businesses and organisations that crunch mountains of data coming in from seemingly endless sources in endless formats every second of the day.

The problem arises because at the beginning of the IT age there wasn't one global store selling everyone the same hardware and software. The story of the Tower of Babel wasn't incorrect; it was just told a couple of millennia too soon. Business integration solutions have helped alleviate many of these problems inside organisations, but we need to better address the situation when the Internet is involved.

Despite all the standards and technologies that have allowed information to flow more freely over the Internet, customers have often had to use a hodgepodge of methods to rewire software programs so they could work together over the Web, across different vendor platforms, operating systems and programming models.

This has been very time-consuming, labour-intensive, expensive work – a whole lot of energy, talent and money spent on plumbing and infrastructure. Each time a customer discovers that an item ordered online turns out not to be in stock, or a company cannot integrate diverse demographic data in order to carry appropriate inventory, they're feeling the effects of software systems that do not communicate well with each other.

Simply put, Web services are a new set of standards that businesses can use along with secure, powerful infrastructure "middleware" to bring down the Tower of Babel. This combination enables diverse existing systems to talk to each other much more easily and allows data originally in multiple formats and from multiple sources to be integrated into useful forms. Clearly, the more we come to rely upon the Web for our business and leisure activities, the more important Web services become. The alternative – rebuilding or scrapping old systems and software every time the next big thing comes down the pike – is too costly to contemplate.

The numbers bear out the attractiveness of Web services. In a recent Gartner survey, 54 percent of respondents said they planned to use Web services to integrate applications within their organisation as well as with partners over the next 12 months. Last year, only 27 percent of IT executives said they planned to use Web services. Gartner estimates that by next year, 70 percent of the Global 2000 companies will have experimented with Web services; IDC sees this as a US$27 billion business in the U.S. alone by 2010.

The Web services concept is already making its mark. Con-Way, a freight-transportation company, uses Web services to enable its system to communicate with those of its customers and logistics providers. Route One, a company formed by the financing arms of DaimlerChrysler, Ford, GM and Toyota, needed to link dealer, credit-bureau, bank and finance company databases together from the four parents. Without Web services, the cost of retrofitting the diverse systems would have scuttled the project, which now makes it easier for dealers to arrange financing for customers.

The State of Wisconsin uses Web services so police can instantly collect information on out-of-state drivers during traffic stops. And Photon Research Associates, which analyses U.S. satellite performance, uses Web services to enable downloaded images to be distributed to commercial and intelligence-community end users from a single server, regardless of the technology used at the source or by the recipient.

Web services are here, operating behind the scenes to make a great deal of what we do now run better. The hype surrounding Web services' introduction is gone, replaced by a hard-edged business need for cost-effective IT communications. And the future of Web services looks good, thanks in large part to a growing commitment by all players to open-standards-based technology. Through organisations such as OASIS and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), tech providers are ensuring that software systems conform to standards that allow their use with applications that are both cutting-edge and 30 years old, so nobody gets left out of the party.

After all, isn't that the promise of the computer age: getting everybody, everywhere, into the party and speaking the same language? With Web services, it's finally possible.