Systinet Corporation, a US-based web services infrastructure supplier, is making a push into Europe using a licensing model that avoids up-front payments.

Under its licence agreement, customers receive Systinet's Web Applications and Services Platform (Wasp) products free for development, testing and small deployments before charging begins.

The company claims that the approach helped it build a base of 26,000 registered users worldwide, which has so far produced several hundred live Wasp implementations.

Roman Stanek, founder and chief executive at Systinet, told vnunet.com: "The business case for web services is its flexibility and simplicity, with applications invoked without the need to know the platform."

Systinet's latest UK customer is real-time payment processing company Retail Decisions which will use Wasp to provide web services access to its core LiveProcessor software. Other UK customers include JP Morgan and T-Mobile.

"The good thing about web services, if standards are truly open, is the potential for small independents to undermine the big guys," said Butler Group analyst Alan Lawson.

"They can offer a more attractive price and better service level to keep the big guys on their toes."

The anlyst added that now is the right time to roll out web services internally, but he warned that good security needs to be built in.

Butler Group expects that it will be five to 10 years before security is good enough for full web services.