The advent of SOA and standard-base Web services together with Internet based delivery models has provided the essential base for facilitating new software platform innovations. One of these innovations is a breakthrough software componentization technique that we have coined Service Oriented Programming (SOP). While SOA focuses on communication between systems using 'service operations,' SOP provides a new technique to build agile application modules using in-process, native service operations as the 'units of assembly.'

Every major chip manufacturer has delivered or announced a roadmap for multicore chips that have multiple CPUs on the same piece of silicon. Systems developers are now designing these chips into their entire product line. For Java platform developers, Symmetric Multiprocessing Systems (SMP) should be hidden well below the hardware abstraction layer, but not all applications will get equal benefits from SMP without understanding what's going on under the hood.

Web services technology has become the ubiquitous connectivity fabric amongst diverse business domains and technical camps. At the same time, distributed parallel computing is becoming the de facto architecture for managing the performance of computationally intensive, long-running programs.

We are often asked by people who are trying to understand the value Grid technology brings to Web services, 'What is the significance of Grid services? They look like Web services.'

In June 2003, the Global Grid Forum (GGF) adopted the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specification as a GGF standard. OGSI is essential to the Open Grid Computing vision as it is the foundation on top of which the building blocks of future Grid applications will be placed.

An important part of the Web service vision being promoted by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) and others is that of automated service discovery, the idea being that when we need a particular kind of service we will no longer have to go out and search for it manually; our computer will do it for us.