By Paul Krill: Web services Web services will enable software to integrate out of the box, leaving consultants to add value elsewhere, ZapThink said. The report also found a significant opportunity exists for consulting firms in the next five years to help companies implement service-oriented architectures. Total architectural and process consulting revenues are expected to surpass those from system integration by 2006. System integration revenue will decrease by more than 70 percent by 2010 while service-oriented business process consulting will increase twentyfold during that time period.

Comment: Somehow I find this intriguing, but it can't be true. APIs to a product are not something brand new and invented just yesterday. Webservices aren't going to change the whole equation. Did adding visual basic for applications lower the IT consulting work outthere or was it the opposite...There is still a learning curve, Webservices is no magic, you still need to learn an API. I think now that more things are possible and easier to do, I suggest we will do more with the same money.