Just as the explosive growth in the usage of Internet was made possible by the standardization of the Web browser, the adoption, growth and success in B2B e-commerce will be controlled by the standardization of XML communication representing business processes among trading partners. There has to be a common set of B2B business processes and a common grammar for B2B to work.

In B2B, interoperability issues exist at almost every level — catalog management, order management, collaboration tools, EDI protocols, shipping services, etc. Standards for data exchange for all the business processes involved in B2B help in overcoming the interoperability issues.

B2B Web services are Internet-based, self-describing and self-contained software resources that form the building blocks of distributed applications and business processes spanning across multiple organizations. Web services offer complete interoperability as they are based on open messaging standards. They work in conjunction with other Web services to complete part of a complex work-flow or business transaction.

B2B Web services can be invoked by partner applications at run-time, over the Internet. The client applications may not even have any prior knowledge of their existence. In essence, Web services enable just-intime B2B application integration.