Hewitt Associates LLC is a global management consulting firm that specifies in human resource solutions. The company has more than 200 corporate clients worldwide; those companies in turn have more than 10 million employees. Hewitt's clients demand timely, accurate delivery of human resources information for those 10 million employees.

Prior to its jStart engagement, Hewitt built custom, proprietary solutions when its clients requested human resources data. Those custom solutions were typically gateways to Hewitt's existing legacy applications; in some cases, the solutions dealt with the actual byte streams. These custom applications were very costly to develop, test, and deploy, leading Hewitt to investigate Web services.