The Internet won’t mature as an e-business environment until the industry converges on middleware infrastructures that bind billions of heterogeneous components into a unified computing web. Everyone agrees that new standards for e-business middleware must address several key business-to-business requirements that traditional approaches don’t support. Business-to-business middleware must use HTTP as the principal transport protocol. It must specify XML as the primary content-encoding syntax. It must work across diverse operating environments, object models and programming interfaces. It must rely on asynchronous message-passing communications. And it must be able to traverse enterprise firewalls without compromising end-to-end network security.