I read a lot of news articles about the industry I work in everyday. So much so that recently I thought I was caught up on all the current trends. Well this morning I was searching for something on the Amazon E-Commerce site and found a reference to a Web Service Marketplace site. The site is called StrikeIron and they describe themselves as follows:

StrikeIron is the worldwide leader in Web services commercialization with its breakthrough StrikeIron Web Services Business Network� (WSBizNet�) that greatly simplifies the selling and buying of Web services for a broad audience of providers and users , while simultaneously supporting commercial Web services integration by ISVs and Solution Providers.

Overall, the StrikeIron Web Services Business Network provides an integrated set of capabilities designed to bring together providers, users and partners as part of a community to accelerate the adoption of commercial Web services. Key to this adoption is the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace as the preferred central location for Web services commerce where publishers and users can come together to sell and buy Web services on top of a powerful technology platform.
Joe McKendrick over at ZDNet interviewed Bob Brauer the CEO of StrikeIron. This is part of what Bob Brauer had to say:

Since the marketplace will serve as a forum for both subscribers and publishers of various services, Brauer evoked the eBay analogy for what he is providing; though he stresses that pricing of services will be fixed, and not auctioned.
Mentioning an Ebay like business model is pretty interesting but we will just have to wait and see if the hype matches the business generated. Whatever happens though StrikeIron sounds pretty interesting. I had no idea that a Web Service marketplace existed, but it is the logical evolution of things. Why should developers have to build services from scratch if they already exist on the Internet? The use of existing services is what Service Oriented Architectures is all about. StrikeIron provides one more avenue for companies or individual developers who create innovative Web Service APIs.