The Labyrinthine Nature of Web Services
Web services is the latest and clearly favored denomination invoked to describe a way of allowing computers to interact and make decisions based on the data that has been fed to them. That much is true. But what non-analysts or non-standards gurus may not know, is that there are other options, albeit ones that are not as popular today. Yet analysts and standards workers have maintained that schemas such as ebXML, or electronic business Extensible Markup Language, remain viable.

B2B arrangements are devised of horizontal and vertical parts. On the horizontal stacks, there are software functions such as messaging, routing and packaging data. On the vertical side, there are business processes, such as a purchase order. That's in general; there are cases where a PO can be part of the horizontal stack.