Over the past couple of years, web services has gone from being
an overly-hyped technology to one that many organizations are
using productively. The early implementations, like all new
technology projects, tended to be sandbox-type efforts or
projects that were small, inside the firewall, and non-mission-
critical in nature. Those brave souls that tried to venture into
the world of delivering web services over the Internet found
that they either had to provide services that were open and
available for use by anyone (for example XMethods or Amazon) or
had to develop their own, typically proprietary, very company-
specific, security scheme. Early adopters using the Internet as
their transport typically used some form of registration process
(for example Google) for open Internet services or only provided
services to a small number of business partners with whom they
already had a tight, trusted relationship. For example, in order
to use Google's web service-enabled search engine, the service
requester must first