Speaking of web services, one of Utah's Enterprise eGovernment projects is a common payment portal.  Lloyd Johnson is the project executive.  Back when we were building payment gateways for First Data Corp., one of the biggest parts of the job was creating SDKs in all the languages that people wanted to interface to it with.  As I found out over the weekend, SOAP can solve that problem with a lot more finesse.  I don't know that Axis is the right tool, but putting a SOAP front end on the payment portal would be a very slick way of allowing language independence.