Needless to say that web services are not the solution for every software system communication.

Nowadays they are meant to be used for loosely-coupled coarse-grained communication, for message (document) exchange. Moreover during the last years a lot of specifications (WS-*) were discussed and finally approved to standardize ws-related advanced aspects including reliable messaging, message-level security, cross-service transactions, etc. Finally web service specifications also include notion of registries to collect service contract references, to easily discover service implementations, etc.

This all means that the web services technology platform suits complex enterprise communication and is not simply the latest way of doing remote procedure calls.