Event
Summary
David Poole,
founder and former CEO of DataChannel, announced the creation of XMLFund, a
venture fund specializing in startup companies that will advance XML technology
and applications. DataChannel uses XML to create Enterprise Information Portals,
to serve information on Intranets, Extranets or the Internet.
Market
Impact
XML is a language
for identifying parts of a document by name. XML facilitates publishing documents
to different media, embedding search terms in a document, and all forms of business
to business commerce on the Internet. It promises to be the way that different
systems can communicate, and is the basis for a number of proposed standards,
including those from Microsoft, Commerce One and Ariba (See TEC's News Analysis
article: "Ariba
Successes Highlight Standards Wars" August, 1999). While the focus of many
backroom projects, XML has not much serious support at present. This new fund
will have a strong positive multiplier effect on XML development.
Poole told
TEC that he expects XML to penetrate the Internet in two waves. The first changes
will occur within companies, as they prepare their internal systems and technology
tools to communicate using XML. Poole sees that within two years the industry
will be ready for the second wave, during which business transactions over the
Internet will become as ubiquitous as deals made over the telephone are today.
Noting that
there are conflicts between different vendors and standards agencies (See TEC's
News Analysis article: "Ariba
Successes Highlight Standards Wars" August, 1999) Poole noted that while
perceived leadership in these areas is important for market positioning, the
issue is one of vocabularies rather than of basic technologies. "It would be
great if we could agree on a single vocabulary," he said, "but that will never
happen. Instead we have XSL [Extensible Stylesheet Language] to translate between
vocabularies.
User
Recommendations
We predict
(90%) that within three years XML will be in use or on the agenda of every company
involved with Internet technology. Converting existing business processes to
the point where they can generate XML-based transactions to integrate with other
companies' systems will be a task that in some organizations will rival Y2K
remediation for the way it touches every aspect of the business. However, only
companies like publishers whose main business is their documents will need to
introduce XML in the accelerated time-pressures of their Y2K work.
Although the
forces that will cause a massive move to a document interchange standard like
XML exist at present, the tools are not available and the pressure is not yet
primarily market-driven. Market pressures will come from the need to implement
other technologies such as business-to-business E-commerce, and from the competitive
savings that can result from standardizing on a single base representation language
for all of a company's documents. Both of these will be accelerated by Poole's
initiative.