Future Methods

A future method runs in the background, asynchronously. You can call a future method for executing long-running operations, such as callouts to external Web services or any operation you’d like to run in its own thread, on its own time. 

To define a future method, simply annotate it with the future annotation, as follows.

global class FutureClass
{
    @future
    public static void myFutureMethod()
    {   
         // Perform some operations
    }
}