WSup
I like Web Services. Although the WS hypemachine went into overdrive the past few years and really raised expectations without there being much really deployed in the trenches, WS technology does have the potential to make application integration much easier. The idea of having a platform-neutral contract that can be used to call services is very powerful. The hype is starting to die out and it is time to do the hard slogging of actually making it work in practice. Some very useful solutions based on Web Services are starting to emerge.
As a case in point, consider XMLA. This is a technology that I've been working with for a few months now and I really think that it offers a better way to provide OLAP services to distributed clients. It is by no means perfect and it is still to early to tell if the technology will really take off. But, it shows real promise and gives me hope about Web Services.