As plug-and-play e-commerce emerges, businesses are mixing and matching web services from multiple partners to create sophisticated e-business applications. Because these “business webs” consist of loosely coupled web services distributed across the web from multiple businesses, coordination among these web services is imperative, in order to carry out business-level transactions. There needs to be the notion of a transaction at the web service level, as well as a means by which software systems can coordinate the processing of calls to multiple web services to provide higher-level business transactions.