For Indian companies like Maruti or ITC Ltd, connected environment would translate into saving the cost of integration and hours of research to study the IT architecture of thousands of partners.
Web services create an environment, where industry standard and protocols-based software connects applications within or outside the corporate boundaries over the Internet.
So, what do web services do to standardise the software and applications that enable them to understand each other and facilitate the data exchange using XML (markup language) which defines the data elements in the communication process.