XML-J: Tell us about Sequoia Software.
Bryan: Sequoia Software is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. We have a product called the XPS, which is a tool that's used for implementing XML-based e-business portals for organizations. I know portal is an often overused or ambiguous term. We really see XPS and portals as much more of an e-business kind of framework, helping companies build more secure extranet environments as well as bringing the customers and their partners into the extended enterprise. It's not just tapping into your e-mail and sports scores through a Web interface.

XML-J: How does XML fit into that whole picture?
Bryan: We've leveraged XML in a lot of different areas. One, we have a built-in, what we call, a rendering server. The rendering server allows your organization to basically associate stylesheets to XML documents based on the user's role or the characteristics or relationships that they have with your company. So it's a very fine way of defining different granular personalization capabilities inside the environment.

Two, we've leveraged XML inside a portal server to enable the routing of information and business objects to different data services. It's not just about delivering information in an HTML Web browser. XML is being used to literally generate the interface: to route information, define new business processes, and wrap the business objects and communicate with the back-end data stores. We've tried to go at the three levels of a three-tier architecture, the presentation, and the business logic or data layer.

XML-J: What's your average customer like?
Bryan: It varies a lot. I think that because of their name, portals typically start out with some sort of an employee kind of framework in which they simply want to provide their employees with access to information, such as their e-mail system; maybe they back our inventory systems. However, once they get the portal installed and begin using it, they quickly realize they can leverage this platform to enable online ordering or to hook in with e-market places or exchanges. We might start in an environment where it's the Internet group and then it scales up to be more of a corporate or an enterprise endeavor. In terms of the profile of the customers, it ranges everywhere from your midsize, 100-300 million dollar customers, to billion dollar customers that are trying to implement huge efforts.

XML-J: What's the pricing structure like?
Bryan: The pricing structure that we've come up with is pretty much based on named users. The reason we've transitioned away from what a lot of our competitors do (which is more of a server-based use, you pay per server) is we've transitioned to a named user, because the one thing we've added is the ability to scale up the application by having built-in application server capabilities. And the last thing we wanted to do was prevent a company from scaling up or growing their portals simply because they couldn't afford it or didn't want to add another server at a high per-server cost. Of course it does tier down as you go up into more users.

XML-J: The term XML server is overused in the XML industry. How would you describe an XML server from your perspective?
Bryan: I agree with your assessment. The term has been used by XML database vendors (Excelon, Tamino), by EAI tool vendors (MS BizTalk, Tibco), and by application server vendors that use XML as a communication medium. For us, XML server represents the application server and application integration functionality built within the portal server. We've leveraged XML as a packaging mechanism, which is used to communicate with the portal server. Applications can submit XML messages to the server over various transmission protocols. Once received, the message is routed to the appropriate integrated data service by interrogating its content and structure. This allows the utmost flexibility, since nothing is predetermined or hard-coded within the server. Each organization can define its own business rules quickly using a Wizard, and tailor the path a business object takes by altering the XML wrapper elements.

XML-J: Could you comment on XML and its impact on the industry today? Where do you think XML and related technologies are going in the future?
Bryan: XML has had a profound impact on data integration and exchange. Organizations have been starved for a way to package and exchange application data in a ubiquitous fashion. XML has provided the framework that's allowing that to happen. Organizations are also beginning to realize the true value of using XML and XSL when building Web-based applications. The separation of presentation and data has many advantages. You'll see more software vendors using XML for program data to drive highly flexible software components. There are many benefits here - the ability to validate your configuration information, to explicitly define the allowable data elements (through schema), and the portability of XML across platforms and programming languages.

XML-J: What are your plans for future expansion?
Bryan: We believe the portal servers will continue to be deployed in highly collaborative environments, notably domains some might think of as CRM [customer relationship management]. Given our ability to define complex flows and integrate the human into the business processes, we believe that XPS can play a pivitol role as customers look to expand the reach of the portal to trading partners, suppliers, and customers. Of course, XML is the backbone that enables all this through the definition of the Sequoia Business Process Language (SBPL). We're planning to look at XLang (Microsoft) and the Workflow Markup Language (WFML) as mechanisms to further enhance our support for industry standards.

XML-J: Is there a Web site where people can go for more information?
Bryan: They can go to www.sequoiasoftware.com.