WelcometotheproceedingsoftheinauguralInternationalConferenceonService- Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003). This was the ?rst of a series of events that willevolveoverthecomingyears,andwewerehappytoholdtheeventinTrento, where the idea for this conference was born. Trento is a lovely city with many Renaissance buildings, testimony to its great medieval past, and has a bustling modern university ready to master the future. The participants visited Trento at the beginning of the winter season, with excellent opportunities for skiing and hiking. The city o?ers many other tourist attractions, some of which, we hope, the participants took the opportunity to enjoy. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing which has evolved from obje- oriented and component computing to one that enables us to build agile n- works of collaborating business applications distributed within and across or- nizational boundaries. ICSOC aims to become the ?agship conference in the area of service-oriented computing,whichisattractingmoreandmoreresearchersandpractitionersfrom both academia and industry. The beginnings are extremely promising, beyond our most optimistic expectations. We were deluged by requests for further inf- mation from all parts of the world and by a very high number of submissions. In fact, the success of a conference depends on the quality of the papers and on the organizational e?orts of the conference o?cers and secretariat. On the research side, exciting new areas in service computing, including service modeling, composition, business transactions and collaborations, service developmentandmanagement,P2PandGridcomputing,mobilecomputing,and security, were reported in the conference, in conjunction with keynote addresses and informative tutorials o?ered by leaders in the ?eld.