SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- In an IT spending environment where vast new software rollouts are taboo, unlocking the value of legacy investments grows more important than ever, according to panelists speaking Thursday at InfoWorld's Next-Generation Web Services II: The Applications conference here.

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Web services may hold one key to catapulting legions of legacy code across a distributed environment and eventually out to partners and customers, said four panelists hailing from both the private and public sectors.

"In these times you can't throw out valuable business logic because that has been the key to keeping your company growing and profitable," said Alan Boehme, vice president and CIO of Best Software. " Web services can play an integral role as enterprises try to manage their future technology steps."

However, Boehme and others cautioned that Web services are by no means a total panacea in the messy business of application integration, which will continue to require the use of traditional EAI and middleware tools. In particular, Web services' loosely coupled model still has maturity issues to overcome around things such as security, and its true cost of deployment will remain an issue for many enterprises in the year ahead.

Nonetheless, each of the panelists said they are taking those early steps of applying Web services to specific integration projects, mainly internal, to expose and reuse legacy applications and business logic with an eye on measurable ROI.

Palace Resorts is using Web services and other middleware to retrofit its Unix applications so that legacy data can be pushed and pulled from the back end to external customers over the Web, said John Stroker, director of information and planning at Palace Resorts. Above all else, containing the scope and cost of the project were paramount, and in the end contributed to its success, he said.

"We had X amount to spend on Web-enabling our legacy apps and put more projects online," he said. "[With Web services] we ended up on budget and our ROI will be seen in less than one year."

The federal government's Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is turning to Web services and other middleware tools to help expose the best elements of their legacy applications, while also eliminating and streamlining some systems along the way. It's an enormous undertaking that is part of the entire government's efforts to create a single enterprise architecture across agencies and Homeland Defense.

"We have 1,600 financial apps alone, so it's not a question of starting over for us," said Dawn Meyerricks, CTO of DISA and also a member of InfoWorld's CTO Advisory Council. " Web services holds the promise of helping us find all of our legacy systems, integrating our supply chain, and bringing these applications forward."

Using Web services to meld back-end applications is moving ahead well, said Meyerricks. But it will be some time until the level of security and reliability reaches a point where the Web services model can be used to extend the reach of front-end applications that handle crucial military- and weapons-related functions.

Echoing that sentiment, Best Software's Boehme said he will move cautiously on the use of Web services as it relates to the company's process for protecting its customers' credit card information.

"We all like to be out in front with this stuff [ Web services], but you have to weigh the risk until the technology is proven," Boehme said. " Security may be that one area."

Using Web services behind the firewall is another story. DonorWare, a company that provides an integrated, multi-channel system of handling donations to numerous charities, has tapped Web services and open-source tools to create a single API to unify legacy and other applications, said Mike Schroeder, CEO and CTO of DonorWare.

"We've taken our legacy apps and used [open source] Perl programming to put wrappers around them. Now we have a SOAP service to expose the entire API," said Schroeder, who described Web services as the glue for Donorware's various architectural tiers.

Eventually, Schroeder said, he wants to aggregate individual or "micro-level" SOAP services into unified collections of many Web services that can drive higher-level business process integration at the company.

Achieving streamlined and easily changeable business processes across a company, however, will not come about easily until developers begin routinely separating logic at the application, business, and presentation layers, Boehme argued.

Attendees at the conference were eager to pick the panelists' brains on the biggest challenges to implementing Web services, to which Schroeder gave a well-received, if equivocal response.

"The best thing about Web services is that you can get them to do anything," he said. "The worst thing is that you can get them to do anything."