As plug-and-play e-commerce emerges, businesses are mixing and matching web services from multiple partners to create sophisticated business web services. Because these “business webs” are comprised of aggregated calls to loosely coupled web services distributed across the web, and provided by multiple businesses, coordination among these web services is imperative, in order to carry out business-level transactions. There needs to be the notion of a transaction at the web service level, as well as a means by which software systems can coordinate the processing of calls to multiple web services to provide higher-level business transactions.

XAML will provide the standard mechanism to enable XML web services to participate in business transactions spanning multiple parties across the Web. Web services provide unprecedented business interoperability by enabling businesses to share processes and competencies on the web, creating a new era of business connectivity and dynamic, “plug-and-play” e-commerce.