News

CyberSource announces payment support for Web services

• By Rich Seeley
• June 4, 2003

Secure payments via B2B and B2C Web services applications moved a step closer to reality this week as CyberSource Corp. (www.cybersource.com), Mountain View, Calif., announced a suite of interfaces supporting SOAP, XML and WS Security.

Payment processing via Web services may still be a year away from widespread adoption, estimates Matthew Dennison, product manager at CyberSource, a provider of electronic payment and risk management services. But the demand for Web services support is coming from his company's partners, he said, who are starting to build SOAP-based applications for B2B and B2C transaction processing.

"We're seeing primarily technology partner adoption," Dennison told XML Report. "This would be core providers -- people that are providing shopping cart applications, or CRM or ERP applications. As we move into next year, it would be direct customers of CyberSource that would be integrating it into their in-house applications."

Developers seeking to include the new Web services capabilities in applications will be able to access the CyberSource Web Services Development Language from a CyberSource or UDDI resource, according to Dennison. They can then add payment functions using toolkits that support SOAP, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, Apache Project's Axis and any of the IBM developer kits, such as the Emerging Technologies Toolkit, he said.

The Web services interfaces announced this week include a payment transaction interface for accessing CyberSource payment, fraud and compliance management services over a network. The initial release provides immediate support for Microsoft .NET, with an interface supporting Java clients for Unix environments scheduled to be released later this month, according to the company announcement.

While WS Security is still a work in progress, Dennison said CyberSource believes that the needed standards will be in place for business applications in 2004.

"We have a long standing history of providing very strong payment security for our customers," he said. "With IBM and Microsoft behind WS Security, we feel WS Security will provide the technology to continue that tradition within a Web services context."