To this end, Redshaw scrutinizes the vendor's middle management. "Who's running R&D? If those guys really get it, I have a more comfortable feeling," he says. By this test, the major software vendors probably understand Web services technology best, even if their products aren't mature. Working with companies that aren't well established also requires some extra effort. "You have to really play a partner, if not 'big brother' role," adds Desai. "In many cases where we think it is strategic to IT, we become an owner as well as a customer."

However, there are some risks Redshaw isn't willing to take. A vendor's lack of attention to security, he says, "is a deal-breaker." Vendors must address how they plan to maintain security as their software passes data to another vendor's application. "If you have a serious enough gap there, you just walk away," he says.

Whit Andrews, research director at Gartner, adds that a critical factor in the choice of vendors should be whether they are driving the development of standards "or being driven by them." He advises picking vendors that have a financial stake in the outcome of the standards battles.

RISK NO. 4: Adoption by partners is unpredictable.
MITIGATION: Deploy robust middleware that can translate a variety of formats.

If you build a Web services application, will anyone use it? That's a risk you take when you develop a process that's meant to be used by a trading partner. It's one thing to adopt new technology yourself - another to expect customers and suppliers to make the same investments. And when you rely on trading partners to supply Web services that are critical to some business process, the potential points of failure are multiplied. The vision of Web services as a way trading partners could "discover" and use externally published components has generated a lot of hype, but it's far from reality. Nevertheless, early adopters anticipate benefits to using Web services with external partners. The key: Don't rely on anyone else to supply any Web services you need to execute a transaction.

Wells Fargo learned from its experience in rolling out its Internet applications that customers "don't care about the technology," says Steve Ellis, who heads the Wholesale Banking unit, as long as the bank provides reliable and convenient service. So he and Peltz see little need to push customers to adopt simple object access protocol for sending XML messages, or even to send XML messages at all. Instead, the bank will accept messages in any format and convert them to XML for use by the Web services that apply EAI tools.