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January 3, 2000

The Rush To XML
Technology will let companies interact more easily on the Web

By Alan Radding

Illustration by Dave Plunkett

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XML: The Language Of Integration

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InternetWeek Vendors Debut XML Development Tools

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he XML train is boarding and about to pull out of the station, but many companies aren't quite sure where it is going or how to get on. "A lot of people have been on the wrong track with XML," says John Ousterhout, CEO of Scriptics Corp., a business-integration-tool vendor. "They are thinking of it as document-centric, a structured document that will replace HTML."

As the new year dawns, a more appropriate use of Extensible Markup Language is to facilitate business-to-business interactions over the Web. XML lets companies structure and exchange information without rewriting their existing systems or adding large amounts of heavyweight middleware. "This is the huge business-to-business void," Ousterhout says. "There is this big demand, but nothing is there to fill it except XML."

IT managers understand the usefulness of XML. According to an InformationWeek Research Outlook 2000 study, 45% of the 300 IT executives surveyed said XML is on their planned project lists for 2000. "If we didn't have XML, we'd have to build something like it on our own or try to use some low-level API connections," says Roger Bly, founder of Project.net Inc., a San Diego business-to-business project-management portal. Everything in Project.net can be defined with XML. Project.net participants can exchange information via XML throughout the process of project collaboration and project management.

And the vendor community is listening. Bowstreet International Inc., a business-to-business Internet software and services company, provides XML tools to deliver services over the Web. In this case, the company employs XML within its directory product to describe the business processes that it manages. "Applications can then access these services on the fly," says Bowstreet co-founder Jack Serfass.

Sabre Labs, the applied technology research and development division of Sabre Inc., the Fort Worth, Texas, airline reservations systems company, is using XML despite having a mature electronic data interchange system based on EDIFact, the international EDI standard. "We see XML as a new opportunity, a low barrier-to-entry way to extend our reach," says VP Bob Offutt. Sabre uses Bowstreet's XML-based directory to manage its myriad partners providing travel services.

Despite the enthusiasm, XML is no panacea. "It is merely an enabling technology. XML is nothing by itself," says Philip Russom, director of data warehouse and business intelligence at Hurwitz Group, an IT advisory firm. Instead, Russom thinks of XML as "a small bolt in the E-business machine," albeit a very important bolt.

Like SQL or Java, XML is an enabler of infrastructure technology. While many consider it a language, XML actually is a standard for specifying a document markup language based on plain-text tags. Where HTML tags tell the browser how to display various elements on a Web page, XML tags specify what those elements are.

XML provides the key to separating Web content from presentation. When a system receives a page of HTML content, it can display the page, but it cannot understand what the content means. It can't, for instance, pull price and product data out of a Web catalog page. Using XML and various related standards, systems can parse the arriving XML document to extract some content for processing by other systems while displaying other content in different ways for different viewers.

Bob Offut Photo by Steve McAlister For example, solutions provider Synergistics Inc. furnishes a knowledge-management product, Prevail Knowledge Center, that includes a portal. At the portal, information that is pulled from a variety of sources must be personalized for each visitor. The company uses XML to separate data and presents only the appropriate subset of the data for a given visitor.

At this early stage in XML's development, the industry is trying to figure out what the technology will do best. Already, XML appears to offer its biggest payoff in three major areas, says Hurwitz Group's Russom: high-end custom publishing; intra-enterprise application-to-application integration; and business-to-business information exchange.

High-end publishing refers to the kind of complex documentation aerospace manufacturers typically produce to accompany major products. While the core products may be the same, each customer's order is modified to meet its unique requirements.

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