As service providers open up their networks, the differentiator will be how quickly they can put new services into place to respond to trends, and how quickly and effectively they can open up their infrastructure to partners, content providers and even consumers.
The problem traditionally has been that changing one interface could break thousands of others, thus making IT departments somewhat gun-shy about modifying, adding or deleting services in existing frameworks.
That is changing with the XML and TCP/IP-based protocol interfaces of Web Services. Already, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has been widely used to enable software modules to interact through Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
