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April 3, 2000

Adoption Of Standard Fuels Growth In XML Tools

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The Rush To XML (1/3/00)

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InternetWeek BowStreet XML Wares Include Software, 'Factory" (3/13/00)

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XML's advantages include lower cost, more real-time capabilities, and better back-end integration, he says. "It's still early, but you're beginning to see many more tools coming onto the market with XML functions," Freeman says. "I think we're on the cusp of widespread support."

Harbinger already uses a new XML tool from OnDisplay called CenterStage eBizXchange, a data transformation and integration application. Harbinger is using the tool to speed development of services involving XML data exchange for its business customers. CenterStage lets Harbinger accept data in any format, which it can feed to CenterStage in flat files with business rules, and from which CenterStage generates XML files.

While much of the excitement over XML concerns its potential for facilitating business-to-business E-commerce, business IT departments are finding XML provides greater functionality and ease of use to Web-site content management.

Houghton Mifflin Co.'s college division in Boston, for example, runs a site that provides teacher support information for its textbooks, such as chapter overviews, online tutorials, and lecture notes, as well as sales information, such as pricing and general descriptions.

To complicate matters, Houghton Mifflin sells a professor and student version of each textbook, each with four sub-versions. Houghton Mifflin uses DynaBase from eBusiness Technologies, a division of Inso Corp. in Providence, R.I., to manage this varied data. DynaBase incorporated support for XML about a year ago.

DynaBase, a Web content and dynamic data-management application, provides Houghton Mifflin a "content neutral" XML repository, says Justine Lapierre, a systems architect at Houghton Mifflin. The XML capabilities of DynaBase let the company draw out of the repository the exact information needed to generate the different versions of each textbook.

"Until XML, there was no way for us to create a neutral repository for our data," Lapierre says. Houghton Mifflin couldn't design such a system in a standard relational databases without crippling performance, he says. While he won't reveal pricing for the XML product, Lapierre says the cost of the DynaBase software and site deployment was "a few hundred thousand dollars."

One of XML's attractions is that it provides a much lower-cost way to exchange data than does EDI. Still, for smaller companies with few IT resources, XML-enabling applications can be challenging. Even with XML, data integration is rarely a simple task.

Justin Lapierre Photo by Brian Smith However, those companies are getting new options. Some application service providers are beginning to offer ready-made XML services that are designed to help businesses avoid the up-front costs of in-house software development and integration.

That was the case with Galaxy Latin America LLC in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Six months ago, the provider of DirecTV services for Latin America needed a document-collaboration tool for its teams of technical and managerial staff who are installing customer-care and billing systems for the service's local operations.

Dilbert Gonzalez, a senior business analyst with Galaxy, says his group considered going with Novell's GroupWise or Lotus Notes for E-mail exchange of information related to the rollout of these billing apps. But both of these mainstream group collaboration products would have required significant up-front costs and training, he says.

Instead, Gonzalez turned to X-Collaboration Software Corp. in Boston, an ASP that offers a document-sharing service. X-Collaboration's application lets teams store and share documents related to a project on a Web server hosted by X-Collaboration and provides access to documents via the Net.

The application offers intuitive document handling and version management that took little training, Gonzalez says. "Given the time we had to get up and running with teams, the X-Collaboration tool was the best choice for us," he says. The cost of such a service is about $130 per user per year, according to X-Collaboration.

Hurwitz Group's Russom says such ready-made XML-based applications for solving specific business problems will become more common and that a year from now, IT mangers should enjoy a broad selection from which to chose.

That's good news for executives such as Wells Fargo's Peteani. She has already had great results with the first wave of XML tools. The Excelon Dynamic Application Platform product has made additions or design shifts quick and easy to perform on the San Francisco company's intranet application, which provides information on investment products such as 401(k) plans and trusts to sales personnel in remote offices. The Excelon product was also a relative bargain, accounting for about $11,000 of the $100,000 total cost of the project.

Peteani would more than welcome more XML software tools that provide such dramatic benefits. Says Peteani, "We've barely scratched the surface of this technology."

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