XML Puts Content In Play

by Bill Trippe

XML emerged in the late 1990s as the all-purpose solution to your technology woes. Have a content management problem? XML will solve it. Have an application integration problem? XML to the rescue! Have a legacy system you need to get to the Web? Three guesses as to what will solve your problem, and the first two don't count.

In other words, XML has been overhyped. At the same time, it seems to be everywhere. Developers love it, and many now see it as an essential tool in their programming toolkits. Vendors are all over it, and it is core to strategies from the likes of Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and IBM. Moreover, the standards community is replete with XML-based initiatives.

Clearly, there is some reality to XML that lies between information nirvana and nothing. Many organizations have actually put XML to work, and have learned valuable lessons on effective approaches and pitfalls to avoid. This article profiles four organizations that are successfully using XML in core business areas. These organizations represent both industry and government, and they're tackling applications ranging from content management to government compliance to billing and reporting. Some of the applications are departmental while others are enterprisewide. While the details of the customer's requirements and solutions differ, they share some characteristics:

All of the applications involved customer-facing Web sites or integration with Web-based content and applications.

Legacy systems needed to be preserved — sometimes for the long run and sometimes just so the project could proceed quickly.

Various systems needed to be tied together, typically in what has come to be known as a three-tier architecture or n-tier architecture (as opposed to the more traditional client-server model).

The solutions needed to be delivered quickly, and the companies wanted to avoid costly implementations, taking an incremental approach instead.

The reality for these organizations was that business problems needed to be solved quickly against a backdrop of heterogeneous platforms, legacy systems and a growing audience of users only a browser away. While XML never solved the whole problem, it always emerged as a key element in the solution — sometimes as source format, sometimes as a format for interchange. In every case, XML helped solve a practical business problem and wasn't used just because it was the fashionable choice.

All the hype around XML is clouding the real success of the technology, which is often practical and powerful, yet, frankly, mundane. As one technologist interviewed for these stories remarked, XML is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Telco Embraces XML While Preserving Legacy Systems

As the Canadian telecommunications firm Aliant, Halifax, Nova Scotia, brought several other telcos under its umbrella over the last several years, it faced many of the typical IT integration challenges companies face as they grow by acquisition. The biggest problem was the existence of multiple systems performing similar tasks, including in core areas such as customer billing.

Compounding these problems, Aliant was facing upstart competitors in key markets. For example, in Halifax, the dominant urban market for Atlantic Canada, a cable company was providing a new bundled service of Internet, telephone and cable. Moreover, it was initially winning the public relations battle, providing excellent billing and ordering. Aliant had to respond.

In a bold move, Aliant decided to create a bundled service of local, long distance, cellular and Internet access, but it went ahead with the initiative before it could possibly have an IT infrastructure to support consolidated billing for the new offering. The company faced the inefficient stop-gap step of printing the various statements in different locations, couriering them all to a central location and stapling them together.

Enter Whitehill Technologies, a Moncton, New Brunswick, technology firm and maker of XML Transport, a product designed to transform data into and out of XML. Whitehill had some experience using XML to bring Aliant's billing data into a Web-based billing system. Whitehill teamed with Aliant's IT solutions arm, xwave, to quickly provide unified billing statements for the consolidated services offering.

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