Industry Commentary

People are beginning to understand the power of XML. It's an enabler for structured communication within and between companies. XML-formatted documents are used for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) projects to exchange data between disparate systems within an enterprise and B2B solutions, linking buyers and sellers and, more generically, consumers and producers. Both EAI and B2B solutions require the same thing: an easy method to define the data that needs to move between internal systems or between two or more organizations.

Prior to information technology (or IT) there was data processing. We continue to build faster computers and larger disk systems to process and store more data. Relational and hierarchical database systems store the majority of the world's data, which is often held hostage by the application vendors who make it easier to move data into their systems than out of them. Middleware projects, which move data between multiple systems, consume a large portion of an IT department's budget, since disparate systems are the norm in large organizations.

Before XML
Prior to the advent of XML, exchanging data between disparate systems was often a time-consuming chore that involved a lot of manual coding and proprietary intermediate data formats. Comma-separated values (CSV) files or tab-delimited files became the lingua franca for solving the never-ending problem of moving data from one system to another. CSV files offered a solution but created the following problems:

• They weren't easy to understand without column headers, which were often so cryptic it was hard to figure out the underlying data.
• They were nonhierarchical, making it difficult to maintain data relationships when using a simple columnar format for representing data.
• They weren't easily extensible; adding a new column of data more often than not broke the systems responsible for processing the data.

Many CSV files are still in use today, and some companies continue to rely on paper-intensive fax machines for moving data.

XML Benefits
XML-formatted documents solve many of these problems. XML enables hierarchical relationships (i.e., structure) that are easy to extend simply by adding another element tag to the XML document. Also, XML-formatted documents are human-readable, making it easy for people to understand what the tags mean. However, readability depends on the person or people involved in defining the structure of the XML documents.

While XML defines the rules for creating an XML document, it doesn't specify the tag names that should be used for a given type of data. For example, I could use a tag name of and another project manager could use a tag name of .

There are many benefits inherent in using XML for moving information between internal systems or multiple organizations for a specific business process. Some of the benefits include:

• Simplifying the definition of an intermediate data format for moving data between multiple systems
• Enabling data to be searched by field or tag
• Reusing the same data across multiple devices or interfaces; you can use XSLT to easily transform XML data into various formats, such as HTML or WML
• Reducing the opportunity for human error

Vendors are providing or planning to provide XML interfaces to their next releases of database products. Some current offerings require programmers to decipher a new API for importing and exporting XML-formatted documents. If a company has multiple database systems, they need to learn multiple new APIs for moving XML-formatted documents. Enter the middleware vendors, who have always been database agnostic, who are realizing that the most important part of these systems is the data, not the database. A new middleware product category, called XML adapters or connectors, is quickly filling the need for a database vendor-independent solution for moving data between disparate database systems.

Uses of XML Today
Companies often start with internal or EAI projects before tackling B2B projects since it's easier to manage internal politics than trying to get everybody to agree in a multivendor consortium. Highlighted below are two such examples, one involving a Fortune 50 computer manufacturer and the other discussing INS Engineering's use of XML for a new knowledge management system.

Case 1: Fortune 50 Computer Manufacturer
A Fortune 50 computer manufacturer is using XML-formatted data in a new application that makes sales order information available throughout the company in near real-time.

The manufacturer uses an e-commerce procurement system that's supported by software from SAP. Under the original design, sales order information in the SAP system was made available to the executive information system with a batch process each night. With the new application, an enterprise application server (EAS) extracts the relevant data and converts it to XML. Infoteria's iCONNECTOR product efficiently moves the XML information into Oracle and SQL databases that support the company's executive information system, manufacturing reporting system, and sales, marketing, and finance systems (see Figure 1).

The new application replaces time-intensive batch processes with a steady stream of near real-time data. Instead of waiting a day or two to learn the status of an order, executives now have the latest sales order information at their fingertips within minutes.

Case 2: INS Engineering
INS Engineering, a subsidiary of world-class system integrator NTT Data, also uses XML-formatted data to solve the common problem of islands of automation, systems that support only one group in an organization. In this case, three in-house systems had evolved for storing customer information: an Oracle-based system, a Notes-based system, and a custom sales force automation application. The three teams (marketing, business planning, and sales) needed access to each other's data, but the company was looking for a solution that wouldn't require a huge investment in reengineering their current environment. INS also rejected the data warehousing approach, often considered a solution for linking disparate systems, because of its expense and the synchronization issues inherent in that approach.

An elegant solution was created using XML. INS created a knowledge map that provided a front-end to the three systems without changing their contents or structure. Summary information was extracted from the three systems in XML, along with links to their underlying data. Employees in any part of the business now have easy one-stop access to a sophisticated knowledge management system that allows them to quickly find customer information stored in disparate systems.

Summary
XML-formatted documents enable structured communication within and between companies. Early adopters are beginning to see real returns using XML for EAI projects. The most successful business processes or workflows capture data electronically at the source in an XML format and then move that data to one or more database systems for processing.

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