Web services take off

Survey shows that many companies are moving from app integration to business process transformation.

When Soren Burkhart landed the job of CIO at Aloha Airlines a year ago, his marching orders were to quickly break through the constraints of the company's legacy mainframe system. The problem was serious. "Integration points to external vendors were very limited and very brittle. To extend the system to incorporate customer requirements was close to impossible," he says.

Burkhart began migrating applications off the mainframe onto Oracle databases and application servers. He used a Web service to "provide integration points to the old sources of data and feed our new Oracle architecture," Burkhart says. The project "took an order of magnitude less time" than it would have without using Web services.

Burkhart is one of a growing number of IT executives who got their feet wet with a Web services rollout, which involved application integration, and now are moving to more advanced projects that connect to business partners and streamline core business processes.

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Click to see: Survey Results

Burkhart began migrating applications off the mainframe onto Oracle databases and application servers. He used a Web service to "provide integration points to the old sources of data and feed our new Oracle architecture," Burkhart says. The project "took an order of magnitude less time" than it would have without using Web services.

Burkhart is one of a growing number of IT executives who got their feet wet with a Web services rollout, which involved application integration, and now are moving to more advanced projects that connect to business partners and streamline core business processes.

That's the key finding in an Ashton, Metzler & Associates survey of more than 400 global professionals. Sixty-four percent of 419 respondents said their company has deployed a Web service, while 36% said they had not.

The survey also found that once companies have established their basic Web services foundation, they are finding it relatively easy to deploy additional services. In the process, they are building toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA ), in which overall application development and application integration is accelerated by the reuse of software components.

According to the survey, of those companies that have deployed a Web service, 56% used the Web service as an application-to-application interface within the company.

How sweet it is

Daisy Brand's first foray into Web services was a project designed to speed up an internal process, according to Kevin Brown, director of IS at the Dallas sour cream maker.

"Most of the world has looked at Web services as a killer application. We have taken a more pragmatic approach and have focused on using Web services primarily to improve application integration behind our firewall," he says.

The Web service let Daisy Brand take a batch-oriented system that forecasted demand for the company's product and integrate it with an ERP application to create a real-time order-generating system.

Before Web services, the forecasting system spit out a batch text file for each order recommendation. The customer relations team had to enter each order manually, which introduced an additional step and the potential for data errors.

Click to see: Have you deployed Web services

The Web service then writes the XML output to a queue that processes electronic data interchange (EDI ) orders. The Web service also maintains what purchase order is assigned to the order on behalf of trading partners. After the order is generated, an EDI document is sent back to the customer with the purchase order number and the ordered products.