Funded by a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CapStat relies on an SOA foundation to overcome system and data incompatibility problems associated with retrieving and sharing disparate data, Thomas said.

CapStat uses Sonic Software Corp.'s enterprise service bus (ESB) technology to link the command centers and to publish and consume Web services, Thomas said. Thus, partners can share and consume data without having to alter existing systems, he added.

"The SOA model's loose coupling between services is the only practical way to implement and administer CapStat's distributed architecture," Thomas said. "[The ESB] traverses firewalls, routers and other network boundaries between partner organizations to create a shared message channel that is both secure and reliable."

Automatic Data Processing Inc. in Roseland, New Jersey, is rewriting all of the applications in its payroll and human resources arm as Web services that can be exposed to clients, said James Barry, ADP's vice president of application development. Barry declined to detail how many of the hundreds of applications have already been exposed as Web services, but he said that ADP is "far along" in its effort.

For example, employees at a large New York-based investment bank can already access payroll information from ADP as Web services on the bank's intranet, without having to sign on to ADP's Web site, Barry said.