I recently had lunch with the CEO of an information security firm and asked him about an impression I had from talking to firms about this area. "They don't seem worried enough," I suggested. He agreed and noted that part of the reason was the strategy being used to convince people of the need to invest in security. "We've been trying to scare them into action," he said, "and it isn't working."

"Web services" offer an exciting vision of the future of IT service delivery in which widely diverse and physically distributed servers and applications interact seamlessly and automatically via standardized interfaces. In a sense, Web services represent the natural extension of the modular, open architectures of the Internet to higher-level applications. But is the application-level modularity depicted in the Web services vision really feasible? What will the IT services industry look like if Web services are successful? As the Beatles said, "Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan..." Tune in this month and check out the Web services "revolution" for yourself.