Jeanne wrote...
>The long term goal is to have both an Intranet for in-house users (this
>will support a multitude of various applications) and Internet access for
>customers to pay their bill, look up history information and things like
>that (real-time).  We are also looking into telephone systems that will
>allow the customer to call up and get billing/history information.

and also mentioned...
>This is a water utility company.  We have a small IT department.

In addition to the various multi-tiered Client/Server and Web solutions
that have already been mentioned or might be mentioned in future replies
(notice how I resist the temptation to mention various Java based options
here ;-) , you might also want to check out tools like Minisoft Javelin
or WRQ EnterView to give your Intranet or future Internet users access to
your COBOL/VPLUS/IMAGE applications from within their (java capable) web
browsers.

This approach might allow reusing most of your available software and
experience and avoid the sometimes extensive learning-curve of "modern"
client-server or web application infrastructures.

I haven't used Javelin or EnterView myself, but maybe someone from the
list can share experiences in this regard (good or bad) to educate us.

:) Lars