The growth of the Internet has coincided with the adoption of component system architectures. But early component architectures were built on assumptions that do not translate well when multiple business enterprises are involved. Nevertheless, these technologies have become widely adopted within the enterprise and form the basis for the new architectures that are emerging for business to business solutions. This paper looks at the evolution of component architectures in the past decade and tries to draw some conclusions about how these systems will evolve in the next several years.