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At a gathering of CIOs in June, JP Rangaswami, the Global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, aired a few of his frustrations with the way the IT industry has consistently oversold each new wave of technology. Most of his vitriol, though, was reserved for customer relationship management (CRM) software.

"CRM is the biggest load of hype I have ever seen," he railed to the audience. "The bulk of implementations say they are focusing on the customer. Rubbish. They are all organisations still very much focused on the product."

A request for a show of hands on who was still convinced of the benefits of CRM produced only a reluctant, even embarrassed, few. Clearly, this was no longer a technology that IT managers wanted to bet their careers on.

It was a very different story when Rangaswami and others turned to the value proposition behind the current centre of hype - web services - a technology that has become the marketing mantra of almost every software company, whether they have much to offer in that area or not. "Who here has web services development underway?" produced a sea of hands. "Who believes that web services is actually delivering on the hype?", induced a similar showing.

The sense that web services is a genuine breakthrough is the central theme of Information Age's lead feature this month, as CIOs, ecommerce chiefs and development directors tell of their early - and universally positive - experiences.

Indeed, over the 15 years I have been writing about the technology industry - hopefully with a relatively sceptical eye - I have never seen a technology so widely applauded by IT management, so quickly embraced, and with such demonstrably positive results. The Internet included. When CIOs start talking of projects being completed in hours rather than months, of incurring zero direct costs on software, of faster time to market, then something strange and wonderful is going on.

How can that be? Two factors stand out. First, web services is the place where application development meets the Internet. In the last seven years, the web has largely been about the dissemination of information. Now, the Internet - and Internet protocol-based networks within organisations - can be used as the vehicle through which organisations can publish, bind together and execute self-contained software objects, whether they are written in-house or developed elsewhere.

That is possible because, for once, the standards are in place before the technology is applied, standards for insulating the objects from language and platform differences, for discovering and binding the desired objects wherever they reside on the network, and for communicating their function and data requirements.

We came at this issue expecting to hear stories of dashed expectations and partial successes. Instead, the executives we spoke to, without exception, had an overriding opinion on this revolution: if anything, web services is being under-hyped.