There, he notes, "most companies are still doing simple file transfer and EDI," and the contrast is creating an increasing divide between the level of maturity and skills needed to implement internal integration, service architecture and Web services and the lack of those same skills for multi-enterprise B2B projects.

But in this special podcast previewing Gartner's Application Integration and Web Services Summit set for December 4-6 in Orlando, Lheureux detailed numerous new approached to multi-enterprise application integration. They include:

--Extending service-oriented architectures to their external outside business partners.

"To do that they're going to need support B2B business protocols, one, whether is whether its Rosetta net, EDI, Web services or whatever file transfer method you want to use to exchange messages and data with external internal business partners," he says.

"In some cases, you have pure-play B2B vendors, but in many cases we're talking about vendors who really didn't start out their business in B2B but have merely added B2B capabilities to that technology," he adds.

-- Doing a better job of managing -- and establishing standards for -- Web Services.

Vendor-supplied, internally deployed enterprise service bus or SOA product can provide a high level of reliability when used with Web Services, "but from a B2B perspective, we don't have an industry standard that provides a high level of reliability for Web services," Lheureux notes. "We're still waiting for Web service reliability standards or one of these high quality of reliability standards to be approved by some standards committee, widely adopted by all the vendors and, then be made available to be deployed by companies.

"And that's going to be a bellwether event, when that happens, and then we'll see Web Services in the B2B context to be deployed very widely," he adds.

-- Embracing the portfolio approach and "Integration Service Providers."