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It seems that rather than follow Microsoft's more proprietary .NET approach, IBM's strategy for supporting Web services is to favour "open Internet standards". In a declaration of intent, it has announced that it is enabling all its middleware to support Web services applications.

IBM estimates that the market for infrastructure software and services could reach $50 billion by 2005. Furthermore, it believes that the integration

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of business services will increase the number of transactions on the Web 50-fold, again by 2005.

According to Steve Mills, Senior VP of the IBM software group: "Web services are emerging e-business applications that can connect and interact with one another on the Web more easily and efficiently, eliminating much of the time-consuming custom coding currently required in, for example, B2B environments."

While IBM's approach may at first seem more "virtuous" than Microsoft - the good "open" guy against the bad "proprietary" guy, this view has to be balanced by a couple of points. First, Microsoft's approach does heavily incorporate open standards such as XML and SOAP (simple Object Access protocol). Second, IBM's huge existing body of software systems favoured the adoption of common standards - the company is already heavily committed to Linux and Java-based technologies, and this is unlikely to change.

The range of middleware involved includes DB2, Lotus, Tivoli and WebSphere.