And they're doing it right now.

The Legacy Albatross

Legacy applications underlie almost every enterprise. In general,these applications are stable but inflexible, expensive and difficultto maintain. How expensive? According to Gartner, between 60 percentand 80 percent of an average company's IT budget is spent onmaintaining existing mainframe systems and the applications that runon them. Maintenance of legacy software is complicated by the factthat the number of programmers who know how to handle former standardssuch as Cobol is shrinking with each passing year.

Though not every legacy application needs a complete overhaul, theharsh reality is that all legacy systems at least must be Web-enabledif a business is to grow and remain competitive, says PacifiCare'sFitzpatrick, senior vice president and CIO of the $12 billion SantaAna, Calif.-based company. Fitzpatrick plans to migrate from threedisparate legacy software systems to a single, Web-enabled platform,which she hasn't yet chosen.

"Right now, cost efficiency is key," she says. "Maintaining and tryingto integrate multiple software platforms becomes expensive over time.There's a great business need for companies to strive to provideincreased service levels to customers. Web capabilities arethe path."