Interesting blog posting by Mark Morley of GXS on AS4, Cisco's implementation of AS4, and its potential as a foundational standard for cloud computing:

Cisco is the one of the first companies that I have heard of that is actively using AS4 and as with the Walmart effect caused by their AS2 supplier mandate I wonder if Cisco will help to see wider adoption of AS4 in the High Tech market space?, especially given their position in the market of setting up data centres for hosting cloud based infrastructures.

If nothing else AS4 is perfectly timed to meet the challenging needs of integrating cloud based services