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Security automation: The next wave Security counterattack How to SOC it to the bad guys Visa: Taking on Web services with resolve Your opinion: Tech talk Q&A: When trust isn't enough

With a corporate ad slogan extolling "It's everywhere you want to be" and a payments network that indeed serves nearly every country in the world, you can bet Visa U.S.A. IT executives feel the onus of availability and reliability.

Hiccups simply can't be tolerated when 14,000 financial institutions count on your payment-processing system for more than $1 trillion in annual transaction volume. That's 5,546 payment-transaction messages per second, or 100 million transactions a day, on average. (During the most recent December shopping frenzy, Visa's message gateway handled 9,200 transaction messages per second.)

Placing that volume in context can be difficult, says Sara Garrison, senior vice president of network and open systems development at Visa, in Foster City, Calif. But think about this, she says: "If you take all the transactions across all the stock markets and exchanges in the world, and you aggregated them over a 24-hour period, we do that volume over a coffee break."

Needless to say, Visa doesn't make infrastructure decisions lightly. But the company does push boundaries and rapidly adopts technologies that could benefit Visa member banks, the merchants they serve and, ultimately, consumers holding the 458 million Visa-branded cards in the U.S. This doesn't mean the company embraces technologies on the high-risk bleeding edge, Garrison says. But it usually finds itself on the leading edge - which makes it well worth watching as it ventures into use of new data center technologies.

Take Visa's evolution toward a services-oriented architecture (SOA) and use of Web services . Like many companies, Visa has long recognized the inherent value of services-centric application development. But Visa leapt ahead of most companies by extending Web services to business partners.

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As of late last year, Visa uses Web services to allow direct communication between its back-end systems and those at member banks involved in the charge-dispute process. Visa already used Web services internally for this industrial-strength dispute management system, called Resolve OnLine. A mammoth undertaking that involved 150 developers working concurrently for nine months to meet the first release date, this industry-reference Web application for development projects is now in its fifth-generation release. Created by Visa developers using Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Mercury and Rational tools, in conjunction with IBM's WebSphere Integrated Application Suite, Resolve OnLine automates the dialog across back-end systems so disputes could be quickly resolved, Garrison says. Extending Web services to member banks enabled Visa to streamline the process further.

Prior to Resolve OnLine, which went into production in June 2002, cardholder disputes had to be processed on paper. Visa couldn't easily automate the process because of the differing back-end systems and legacy specialized-functionality tools in use throughout the industry. By using Web services, Visa and member banks have eliminated many of the remaining manual processes involved in dispute management. For example, back-end systems at Visa and member banks now can communicate directly regarding requests for transaction research, dispute case search and retrieval, and requests for copies of original paper receipts. Visa secures the inter-enterprise Web services transactions via Secure FTP sessions over SSL.