Need a way to connect to a webservice
Craft 2.x includes Guzzle 3 natively, so you could write a Craft plugin that uses it to consume your web service.

There are plenty of examples in the Guzzle 3 docs on how to do that (as well as in Craft itself).

You could also use something like this: https://straightupcraft.com/craft-plugins/guzzle

Which is a wrapper for Craft's Guzzle 3 you can use from a template.