If you’ve bought a house, chances are Freddie Mac has touched your loan. A leader in the secondary mortgage market, Freddie Mac–the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.–owns one-sixth of all American mortgages. Its computers process tens of billions of dollars every day and exchange critical information with a host of banks, brokers and investors.

So when the company decided to migrate critical applications from mainframes to Web services, the executive team knew the transition would be a high-wire act without a net. A single misstep could choke off the flow of transactions, compromise security and land Freddie Mac in serious trouble. But the payoff–streamlined operations that would save billions of dollars–was worth the risk.

I visited with Freddie Mac earlier this summer, and got the scoop on their transformation to a Web Services shop for the current issue of Network Computing. It is nice to be back there, after so many years (I headed the original launch team back in 1990.)

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