Eastman Chemical's architecture is inspired by the need to be more collaborative in how it does business. "We must be able to appropriately expose our internal systems, processes, and data to customers and suppliers," Sturgill says. That's more easily done with the new architecture because integration is an inherent part of the design, rather than an expensive add-on. "As a supplier, we can produce services that our customers can consume easily," Sturgill says. "This increases our value proposition to that customer and lowers the cost of collaboration for our trading partners and us."

There's more to all this IT architectural activity than Web services. At Corporate Express Inc., an office-supply company with sales of $6 billion last year, the focus has been on consolidating servers and moving toward open-source software, both cost-cutting measures, and moving application development to Java 2 Enterprise Edition for increased flexibility. The company runs Sun Microsystems servers, a storage area network with EMC and Network Appliance products, internally developed warehouse management and E-commerce applications, and webMethods integration software.

Key challenges for Andy Miller, the company's VP of technical architecture, are the need to keep scaling the IT infrastructure to support a growing business while tightening security. That's causing Miller to spend more time and energy on operational issues and less on research and development. He's also up to his APIs in integration work. "We give our customers XML formats and other information on how we want to communicate securely," he says.

Mark Hoffman, Corporate Express' president and CEO, says the company's evolving IT architecture is helping squeeze the cost out of order handling, which is no minor matter since the cost of processing an order can sometimes exceed the price of a small-ticket item being purchased. "We'll streamline the entire buying process," Hoffman says.

Changes in the physical makeup of IT products come with their own ramifications for computing architectures. Blade servers and new integration-ready appliances packed with sophisticated software aim to simplify the deployment and management of key capabilities, and do so at lower cost. Robert Fabbio, CEO and president of Vieo Inc., says this is leading to a new type of architecture that combines superthin, high-density components with high-speed backbones. "Data centers will be built like Legos, and applications will be migrated very easily across the various pieces," he predicts.

Vieo, founded in the mid-'90s as a consulting firm, was relaunched two years ago to build appliances for what it calls adaptive application-infrastructure management. The appliances, scheduled for availability early next year, will combine application-aware networking with management capabilities and are intended to be alternatives to all-encompassing management tools such as those offered by Computer Associates and Tivoli. Fabbio should know something about the shift in management tools--he founded Tivoli 13 years ago. "You're going to see a much different approach to management this time around," he says.

The Southern California High-Tech Task Force, a law-enforcement agency, uses a new storage appliance from EMC to archive data on its so-called evidence network, which lets law-enforcement personnel manage case files. The setup replaces an outdated approach in which investigators actually stored data on CDs at their notebook PCs and servers. "Our case resolution will increase, access to data will significantly increase, and the investigator will no longer be involved with archiving," says Rick Craigo, the task force's project director. "It streamlines our investigative process on the forensic side."