consumer web service over secured tunnel

Need some assistance with consuming a web service. We are trying to consume a web service from one of our vendors using SOAP over HTTPs. Currently we are not exposing or consuming any web services to this vendor. Plan is to create a secure tunnel to this client for security and not to encrypt the data that will be passed. My understanding is while consuming the web service we can directly create a web service descriptor from the vendors wsdl and call the web service using the security tunnel that is created. But I was asked that if we can use a service gateway at the DMZ layer so that our IS will not interact with the partners directly. That means when back end user call webMethods my flow service will invoke the connnector which should again invoke the service gateway that calls the vendors service to give me the result back. How can I achive this? Do we need to do this as we are calling the vender and not the other way? what would be the best way to create a consumer web service in webMethods with out encryption and just using the secured tunnel.

Thanks
Vinny

Gateway server or DMZ layer is not used for outgoing requests.Security can also be achieved using ssl certificates

Shahid: Thanks for your response. So in layman terms I can create my connector in IS and call the vendor service directly and use SSL certificates for data security? What in case of Exposing a webservice? My understanding from guides and forums is that we generate the wsdl and place it in DMZ zone and give that address to the client for invoking it, is that the correct approach?