XML and web services are promising technologies that could
revolutionise small business interactions - but approach them with
caution, warns Danny Bradbury
Eric Sigurdson fires up his PC every morning with a renewed sense
of vigour. That is what Extensible Markup Language does to a supply
chain manager. Sigurdson works at Caperio Strategi, a provider of
IT products and services to medium-sized companies in Sweden.
Caperio Strategi used the XML capabilities of Sterling Commerce's
Integrator software to hook its enterprise resource planning system
to its web database so that online orders are transferred
automatically into the company's manufacturing system. Before the
advent of the XML system employees had to create a paper copy and
rekey everything.
Data integration stories like this, with XML at their core, are
becoming more widespread. XML evolved from its predecessor SGML. It
is a meta language - a language used to create other languages.
Like HTML, which is the language used to describe web mark-up, XML
works using a series of tags. The difference is that the tags are
user-definable and can be used to describe everything from invoices
to knitting patterns.
As different vertical market sectors have embraced XML they have
created their own vocabularies of tags designed to describe
industry-specific data. The initial vocabularies were called
document-type definitions but these were superceded by a more
sophisticated kind of vocabulary document called a schema.
What it can deliver to the business is data integration. Companies
can use XML schemas to get different systems to talk to one
another, creating a sort of Esperanto for computers. That is the
theory, anyway, and it seems to be working well for
Sigurdson.
The three biggest advocates of XML are Microsoft - which has bet
its business on it - Sun Microsystems, and IBM. All three have
bought into an even newer concept called web services, where XML is
used both to exchange data and to carry out processes.
Until now, many business services have only been available online
in human-readable form. You can search a courier's online database
to find out where a package is on its journey, but you cannot get
your computer to do it for you. Web services technology uses XML to
expose that data in a computer-readable form, so now your shipping
and logistics application can find the information for you - and
use it when processing data.
Small businesses are high on IBM's agenda, says the firm's web
services and XML web services evangelist, Mark Colan. He is touting
an IBM service called jStart, focused on getting businesses started
with new technologies cheaply. The company supplies one or two
consultants instead of an entire team, and will map out a
technology platform for a company to build its business on. "Web
services are real and we have a lot of companies using them in
production now," he says. Such cheerleading is encouraging, but IBM
would not name any customers in the UK that are using the
technology in anger.
Part of the problem for web services and its relatively slow
take-up is that, in spite of the benefits being touted by the
suppliers, it poses many challenges for small businesses, not least
of which is the long-term nature of the proposition. XML and web
services are useful for internal integration, but in many cases
this can be carried out with the same amount of back-end SQL
programming and a set of object database connectivity drivers.
"We could have done this straight from one database to the other,
but since we have chosen the product we want to have all
integration done via Sterling Integrator," says Sigurdson,
suggesting that the decision to use XML for integration was more
supplier-driven than customer-driven.
The same is true of Lupton Fawcett, a legal firm that worked with
consultancy ITM Group to implement Novell's Silverstream exteND
integration software. Lupton Fawcett's IT manager Sean Denham uses
Silverstream to aggregate data into a central XML-driven portal,
but admits he used it simply because it came with the package. "It
was not the reason we went for this product. But I think it is
something that could be an additional bonus," he says.
The area where XML and web services will really deliver benefits is
in inter-company integration, where business partners integrate
their supply chains, publishing data sources for each other as web
services, and exchanging documents in XML format so computers can
read them.
Kevin Hart, business development manager at Sage eServices, says
the company is one of several suppliers that have integrated the
eBis-XML schema set into its accounting software. The family of
schemas, produced by the Business Application Software Developers
Association, enables companies to exchange business documents such
as purchase orders and invoices.
The problem is that even in horizontal e-commerce there are several
standards for XML-based business documents. XML interoperability
group Oasis, along with the United Nations e-business group
UN/Cefact developed ebXML, for example, to serve a similar purpose.
Confusion over XML standards, and the investment needed to modify
back-end systems to support the formats, is making it difficult for
companies to persuade business partners to make the switch to XML.
Sigurdson says he would like to extend XML integration beyond the
firewall to connect with suppliers and customers. "We have over
1,000 customers but not all of them are ready to integrate," he
says, and the three large suppliers that take 90% of his orders
have the same problem. "It will be a difficult task to change them.
They have a large customer base."
Other issues, such as security and reliability, face inter-company
integrators. While Microsoft and IBM are addressing this with new
XML-based formats such as WS-Reliability and WS-Security, it is
still too soon for many companies to take a gamble on untested
technologies.
XML and web services have a lot to offer, but the real cost savings
will not emerge until more people adopt it. They are caught in a
familiar Catch-22 situation, as we wait at the bottom of what could
become a promising growth curve.
Summary
XML provides a data integration language that is readable by both
machines and humans (with a little training)
Vertical markets have been working on their own XML-based data
integration languages
Web services let enabled applications interact autonomously with
services on the internet
XML and web services can be used both for internal data integration
and to connect to your business partners' supply chains
Challenges to inter-company integration with web services include
reliability and security issues, slow take-up and numerous language
"standards".
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