Two years after Web services were first introduced as an open standards-based scheme for B2B integration, actual B2B deployment of Web services remains sparse. Blame it in part on the economy and in part on the tendency of organizations to test out new technologies internally before taking them outside the firewall.

“We’ve been in an IT recession,” says David Linthicum, CTO of Mercator, a B2B integration software vendor. “For most organizations, it’s harder to justify Web services in B2B projects.” He estimates that only 10 percent of his customers, all of whom are doing B2B work, are dabbling in Web services, with a mere 1 percent approaching implementation.

Fred Holahan, vice president of Web services firm SilverStream Software (recently purchased by Novell), notes that most organizations already have some type of usable B2B integration in place, making Web services projects less likely to offer immediate ROI. “It’s difficult to justify an incremental improvement in financial return in a tight economy,” he explains. “People may say, ‘We’re already doing some B2B stuff. We know we have to progress at some pace on new Web initiatives, so we’ll use Web-based integration technologies like Web services internally to hook a bunch of stuff together, and when economic times improve, we’ll have an opportunity to expose those things externally.’”

Overall, only about 12 percent of current Web services projects are aimed directly at B2B integration, says analyst Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, an XML and Web services research and analysis firm. “Of everyone using Web services,” he estimates, “85 percent are for internal use only, 12 percent are for B2B situations and maybe 3 percent are for B2C.” But, he notes, many of the internal activities may be preliminary work to longer-range B2B projects. “They may say, ‘Well, once we’ve done this, it’s pretty trivial to allow stuff to go across the firewall.’”

Nigel Thomas, the director of product marketing at messaging technologies company SpiritSoft, agrees. He says he hasn’t seen any B2B projects as yet among his customers using Web services. “So far, it’s 100 percent internal integration,” he notes. “But I think a number of the internal projects are being deliberately chosen for their B2B potential in the future.”