IBM bets on XML

IBM is marshaling its vast resources around the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in an attempt to leverage the technology’s potential across its product line. Although most of this work still resides in IBM’s research facilities, the critical role XML will play in IBM’s enterprise computing strategy will be made apparent through a series of initiatives that the company is expected to outline beginning this summer.

“It’s almost like stealth XML. What we have today are some products coming out with an XML twist, but we’re still trying to understand the wider implications,” said Craig Hayman, IBM’s program director of repository strategy in Raleigh, NC.

A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification descendent from Standardized General Markup Language (SGML), XML is a metalanguage, or a language for creating custom markup languages, which in turn are used for generating documents. Already finding its way into competitors’ products from Microsoft’s Office 2000 to enterprise server software from Netscape, IBM intends to use XML as connective tissue among its myriad development tool, middleware, and database products on multiple platforms.

Company executives said they believe XML can be the best way to exchange data via the Internet without standardizing on a set of proprietary interfaces or being required to lock into a defined set of programming tools.

For example, this summer IBM is expected to announce plans to further exploit XML to share data within its e-Business product suite.

“The combination of XML and JavaBeans allows us to take all these products together and deliver some fantastic solutions,” Hayman said.

Among IBM’s XML efforts are inventing ways to consolidate Web server administration tasks and creating Java content viewers for programmers, according to one IBM researcher.

According to some observers, IBM’s XML efforts to date have lacked cohesion.

“It seems that each group within IBM is picking and choosing [research and product directions] on the fly. There hasn’t been a message from the top rung about XML’s importance,” said J.P. Morgenthal, president of NC.Focus, a consulting company in Hewlett, NY.

That message is expected to begin emerging later this summer; IBM will issue higher-level strategic pronouncements about XML and announce the establishment of a clearinghouse for its XML efforts, located at its Center for Java Technology in Cupertino, CA, company sources said.

“IBM is looking to provide some organizational focus for these activities. It would be easy for IBM to spend money four or five times to do the same work,” said Tom Bishop, chief technology officer at IBM’s Tivoli Division in Austin, TX.

Such a clearinghouse is needed because XML is applicable “anyplace there’s data sharing and exchange,” according to NC.Focus’s Morgenthal.

Of particular interest is easing the burden on developers by replacing proprietary APIs for such software as MQ Series and TX Series middleware, and potentially replacing older specifications such as the SNMP standard, according to Morgenthal.

Many of XML’s benefits will be invisible to users, said Valerie Olague, manager of IBM’s application development and object technology, in Somers, NY. She describes XML simply as a tagging language with beginning and ending tags.

How users interpret those tags and the data between those tags depends on what specific document type users are dealing with.

“There is a lot of momentum around utilizing XML as a way to pass data around the Internet,” Olague said. “It gives you a very easy way to specify what to do with that data on the receiving end when you get it.”

From the tools and languages end of IBM’s software business, executives view XML primarily as a metadata interchange format.

“Basically, the focus is to have XML serve as an interchange format between repository tools like Team Connection and various industry modeling tools from both IBM and other vendors products,” Olague said.

IBM’s database group is one of the earliest elements of IBM to seize on the potential of XML.

“XML can tag data of a textual nature, which users will have a lot of in the future, because a lot of Web sites now contain a lot of XML,” said Jeff Jones, program manager for IBM’s Data Management marketing, in San Jose, CA. “You want to store [XML data] in a place that can scale, that can reliably manage it.”

One XML vendor noted that while many companies have made XML announcements, such as Lotus, Netscape, and Microsoft, very few vendors have outlined a comprehensive strategy for using the technology and even fewer are actually shipping XML tools today.

“Whether it fits into Notes or the AS/400, the question is, when are they going to ship?” said David Pool, president and CEO of DataChannel, a Bellevue, WA-based XML software producer.

Although IBM’s commitment to XML is all-embracing, veterans of the company’s Java drive welcome any attempts at coordination.

“From the technical side, there’s this landslide of new technologies. We need to take a pragmatic view of XML,” said one IBM insider. “Early on with Java, we had a Java hammer and everything looked like a Java nail. XML is very useful, but we’re not going overboard.”