When Soren Burkhart landed the job of CIO at Aloha Air Group 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.
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 percent 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 percent used the Web service as an application-to-application interface within the company.
