Web services technology is all about distributed computing. There is no fundamentally new basic concept behind this and related technologies. What is really new is the reach of Web services and its ubiquitous support by literally all major vendors. Most likely, heterogeneity will at the end no longer be an obstruction for distributed applications. This will have impact on application architectures, middleware, as well as the way in which people will think about computing and businesses use

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... ting resources. We sketch these impacts as well as some exemplary research work to be done to actually build the outline environment.