Sir George Whitehouse KCB FRGS (26 July 1857 – 17 November 1938) was an English civil engineer, chief engineer of the Uganda Railway between 1895 and 1903 and responsible for the founding of Nairobi.[1] (wikipedia)
These are standard technologies and can be done securely.
B2B is all about setting up a secure environment with trusted partners.
We had to drive down the cost of operations and it is being made easier by the arrival of web services.
If you abstract away to the business logic, then you can just deal with that rather than having to worry about the system behind it.