"Being able to quickly and remotely deploy those fixes without having to visit those PCs is a great time-saver for us," says Iannello, who adds that the software also lets Movado be more proactive about having the latest security fixes in place.

Iannello cautions that companies get maximum benefit from this type of investment only if users are geographically dispersed. "The more machines you have and the more distributed they are, the more valuable something like this is," he says.

Royal Caribbean’s Murphy also warns that such simple solutions may not scale to serve the entire enterprise. A password reset package such as P-Synch may work great for 4,000 users, he notes, but not necessarily for 20,000 users as a long-term, enterprisewide solution.

Integrated Cost-Cutting

Integration can be a money pit?that’s not news. EAI frameworks and EDI implementations can cost millions of dollars. The potential for cheaper connections both inside and outside the firewall exists with Web services, even this early in its existence.

Sheri Anderson, CIO of Xilinx, found that by using Web services company Grand Central Communications she was able to establish a connection with an important external business partner quickly and for a fraction of the cost she’d expected. The key is to avoid one-off custom integration projects with high, ongoing maintenance costs.

Xilinx, with $1 billion in revenue and 2,600 employees worldwide, is a semiconductor company that outsources most of its manufacturing and other functions. "We have lots of needs for partner interfaces," explains Anderson. "They’re not optional." When one partner suddenly needed to exchange large amounts of unstructured data with Xilinx, Anderson brought in Grand Central to quickly deploy a secure Web services-based data exchange and format translation capability.

"It was quite a big win because I didn’t have to go build support for a new kind of protocol, which would have taken weeks," says Anderson, who noted that the total cost of the service, at under $200,000 annually, was less than one-tenth what it would have cost to solve the problem using a traditional value-added network.

Better yet, Anderson could leverage the solution for other projects without additional custom development because Grand Central’s hosted service included prebuilt connections to many other data exchange formats and protocols. Once Xilinx built its connection to Grand Central, it could communicate with additional partners in multiple formats without more custom development. That fit right into Anderson’s plan. "I’m trying to get rid of customization to manage down my costs," she says.