Phillipps: It's definitely more expensive. We should acknowledge that, but there's revenue there that's being left behind, and the expenses will justify it. If you're selling a high-ticket item or just winning a customer, it's about a better relationship.

P. Lecoq: It's all in how you deliver it. There are certain things that are high cost, especially if you're looking at a one-on-one client base and you're looking for that customer to implement the solution in-house and it's a big-ticket item. But there are a lot of services available in ASP mode, which really do tend to break down the barriers. To consumers or customers, it doesn't make a difference, but as far as the costs and benefits, they're getting the best of both worlds, depending on the situation they're in.

Phillipps: That's where I've invested myself and everybody at Center 7--in believing that lowering entry barriers, complexity, and cost will speed the maturation of the Web.

InformationWeek: How are you integrating back-end and Web technology?

Bell: It's making data architecture more important. A lot of larger companies are putting certain kinds of technology into containment because we realize we can't support all those different things. We need to get to common kinds of platforms.

A lot of companies only buy software that will work on open architecture, because you can no longer become prisoners of proprietary languages, proprietary databases, those kinds of things. It's really opening up internal architecture as well as simplifying it all at the same time. You almost have to do the same things internally that you have to do outside; you're making it more simple, making it more standard, so you can integrate all these different kinds of technologies with one another. It's changing the way we do business internally as well.

InformationWeek: What about another hot button: security. It seems like hackers can take apart anything. How do you handle security?

Phillipps: We try not to tease hackers, that's the main thing.

Beyond that, it's important to distribute your infrastructure and not have a single point of vulnerability. It's impossible to make it impregnable, so we're focused on distributing it. Part of the maturation is to embrace some of the heavy, stodgy elements of security, part of it is to distribute and make your site more robust through redundancy.

InformationWeek: Are you going to offer security as a service, as an ASP?

Phillipps: No, we're offering it as part of our E-business products. Secure service--whether it's storage, enterprise management so someone couldn't take control of your enterprise and E-business, and even some ERP solutions--all of it must be secure.

Security broadly implies privacy, integrity, authentication, nonrepudiation, all those elements, and each of them has its own issues. The one we're finding most difficult to deal with is nonrepudiation--that people say they didn't say what they said.

There are possibilities in E-commerce to audit what's been going on and we're most excited about how that's progressing and maturing. The other stuff, privacy, is OK; authentication can be accomplished.

F. Lecoq: Everything is relative, because the amount of fraud is probably greater outside the Internet than it is on the Internet. I agree with the idea of distribution of service and the strong E-commerce security tools available today.