You forget that I wrote the book on this company. If you go back to my many accurate and almost no inaccurate comments about the price and fundamentals under her, you'll appreciate just how well I do. If you had followed my explicit advice, you'd be sitting in the catbird's seat like I have since Dec '97. If you go back through my many posts you'll see also that my recommendations about management, strategy, product, marketing have been extremely astute, the best fundamental analysis I ever did on any one company, and I've analyzed 5,000 companies over 30 years. Again if you go through my posts you'll see I was almost as strong a company advocate as Gustave. ODIS drove me away just like they did with many of their capable employees. I'm not going to go through a recounting of all of that; it's in the thread and it is still valid. However, since I was the first poster to bring up XML, Linux, and the concept that they have to change into a new company with Objectstore only as an ancillary participant in its product concept, I will provide you with some hope:
Will Servers Tag Along With XML
By Charles Babcock INTER@CTIVEWEEK 3/15/99
The extensible Markup Language is gaining ground so fast as the language that will be used for communicating information between Web sites that it is spawning a new breed of specialized servers: XML servers.
But it's not yet clear whether stand-alone XML servers are required for the exchange of XML-formatted documents and data between businesses, industry experts say. Vendors such as IBM, SilverStream Software and Sun Microsystems say their existing application servers can handle XML formats. IBM, which ships XML support with its WebSphere server, and SilverStream have products available. Sun is the latest to join the group; on March 1O, it announced XML support for NetDynamics 5.0.
On the other hand, a business might move to a dedicated XML server "if people felt they couldn't get all the XML-handling features they wanted from a general purpose application server," says David Skok, SilverStream chairman.
And it's that group that a number of companies are trying to attract with their XML servers.
Bluestone Software (www. bluestone.com) and webmethods (www.webmethods.com) were two of the first entrants in the dedicated XML server market; both launched products late last year. Object Design Inc. (www.odi.com) unveiled its Excelon Server March 1. Software AG (www.softwareag.com), the German systems software company, launched its Tamino XML server March 2; Microsoft (wwwmicrosoft.com) said March 4 that its new e-commerce framework, BizTalk, will include an XML server.
With XML, the text in a document can be tagged so that a receiving application with an XML parsing engine can recognize, for instance, a doctor's prescription as a prescription or a bank check as a financial instrument. An XML server can convert native data into the XML format, and it can move XML data out to destinations on the Internet.
However, dedicated XML servers are restricted by the lack of specific, vertical-market vocabularies that would enable them to refer, for example, to a stock price and have all XML parser engines recognize it as such.
Work is under way to create those definitions in a variety of areas, from defining electronic data interchange data types to vertical-industry data types in health care and telecommunications.'The Open Applications Group, a vendor consortium, is working to specify XML data types for integrating enterprise applications across the Web.
"As soon as those standards are set, XML is going to explode," Silver Stream's Skok says.
While they are all optimized to handle XML code, current XML servers can vary in function. For instance, ODI's Excelon is based on the company's ObjectStore object oriented database. It can serve XML files to a browser and also put them in the server's cache memory or store them in the database so they are readily available for
the next browser call, says LarryAlston, ODI's vice president of marketing.
Bluestone calls the ODI approach suitable for serving static XML or documents and data that already have been converted to XML. The Bluestone XML Server's strength is that it is able to draw data from many sources and convert it to an XML format for serving across the Web on the fly, says Al Smith, Bluestone's vice president of software development.
Alston counters that ODI also can generate dynamic XML documents, when needed, but he says it would prove inefficient to draw all XML documents out of their native data sources. Maximum performance requires being able to store the XML documents either in the server's fast cache memory or in an object database, he says.
Regardless of the debate, there is consensus that XML offers a new level of integration over the Web.
An Aberdeen Group (www. aberdeen.com) report, titled Tightening the Links in the Extended Supply Chain, which was released at the end of 1998, concluded that XML was the missing link in getting applications to work together over a network, because XML offers a simplified form of application integration. "It is possible to extend the capabilities of internal systems to trading partners, using XML," the report said.
Micro Modeling Associates, a custom software development company for financial institutions, has been using ODIs Excelon server for internal uses. Micro Modeling has found it possible to integrate business documents from many sources into a searchable, XML-based knowledge base that software consultants can share.
Phllippe Richard, managing associate in strategic technology practice at Micro Modeling, and others are certain that XML serving will find a growing role as more applications are tied together between business partners, businesses and their customers.
"We feel 1999 is the year that XML comes of age," Richard says. |
