DIGITAL IMPACT IS an ASP that focuses on augmenting the marketing capabilities of its clients. As CTO of Digital Impact, Gerardo Capiel is charged with making sure Digital Impact’s service seamlessly meshes with the marketing operations of its customers. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Capiel talks about how simplified integration capabilities derived from Web services are going to rejuvenate ASPs such as Digital Impact. InfoWorld: How will Web services impact your business? Capiel: In our business, there are what we call marketing events. A marketing event is after you’ve bought something or something about your profile has changed, like you just bought a home or you just had kids. Those marketing events can be collected through all these different sources, and the key is to have a good way to capture that. We think actually that’s an interesting application for .Net technology. When you click on an e-mail, through the redirection process there’s an HTTP interface to our database. The second part of that is having the database structure to actually support an event model, where events are not only events that happen on the Web but could be offline events. Then comes the action part, where you pair events up against a set of marketing offers that you have, and then you figure out what to offer each person at what time. InfoWorld: How do you make the system flexible? Capiel: All marketing messages are encoded in XML in our system. What that means is that we have one template, no matter what the delivery medium is in terms of e-mail for that message. If it’s going to AOL 5.0 or an older version, XML gets turned into a rich AOL format. Or if it’s AOL 6.0/7.0, it turns into HTML. If it’s a wireless device, we could actually take the message and filter it down to 30 characters, based on what the XML tells you about the most important pieces of that marketing message. If it’s going to HTML, then we’ll take that message and translate it to HTML. Once it’s in XML, it’s reusable across all those channels. We code everything on XML, but then we have an engine that knows how to determine what the end platform is. InfoWorld: How important are Web services going to be for ASPs — and in particular, Microsoft .Net for Digital Impact? Capiel: Microsoft .Net is pretty key for any company that really wants to be a serious player in the ASP space. The big issue that ASP companies have had is that it’s hard for them to integrate with internal systems that a corporation might have. With Microsoft .Net technology, it essentially … doesn’t matter where the data or the software sits, and that’s the whole beauty of it. We think it’s pretty important because it’s going to help us not only better integrate our own systems but more importantly integrate with our client systems. Just like our services team becomes a seamless extension of their marketing team, our technology becomes a seamless extension of their infrastructure. Their data warehouses and their production systems, their existing CRM systems or ERP systems can all talk with our software. And our user interfaces can look right into their data in real time. InfoWorld: How does Web services technology help reduce your costs? Capiel: The way we tie that all together is through data transfer back and forth, and that’s done in the rudimentary form of FTP most of the time. But there’s a lot of issues with that. We’d like to see things… taking more of a Web services approach, which allows us to be more real time and to much more easily describe the data. Therefore, our integration costs and our client’s integration costs for building data exchange would go down substantially. That’s how it’s going to help us in the future. We already tie that circle but it costs a lot of money to tie that circle. Web services will help us tie that circle at a much lower cost. InfoWorld: How do you integrate your service with organizations running Java architectures? Capiel: The bottom line is that as long as you’re using HTTP and XML and SOAP, it doesn’t really matter what you call it. As long as you stick to those standards, .Net should be the same as whatever Sun is proposing and whatever anybody else is proposing. We could say we’re also compliant with J2EE. We acquired a company called Mindshare, which was in the analytic space with an application we now call Impact. The way we bridged our technologies together, because they were a Microsoft house and we’re very much of a Java shop, is by using HTTP, XML, and SOAP. InfoWorld: How would you describe that process? Capiel: It was totally manual. And we still have issues with compliance in the SOAP protocols between what Microsoft had done to support SOAP and what Sun had done to support SOAP and Java. There were minor differences that created problems. I don’t think tools are going to fully solve those problems right away because the tools are being developed mainly by Microsoft and Sun, and all the other tools are just still much further behind. The good thing is that because you can actually take an XML file and open it up and look at it, it’s at least a lot easier than the way it used to be. InfoWorld: What impact will Web services have on enterprise application integration software? Capiel: It’s gotten a lot easier than it used to be and I think as these vendors integrate with Web services, it’ll get much easier to implement. That’s what makes a difference. It has to be really easy. That’s why the other things never took off before. It was too hard. What’s important is being able to quickly integrate and get things done. InfoWorld: In addition to Microsoft software, Digital Impact also relies on Tibco middleware software. Why do you need this additional layer of software? Capiel: What’s most interesting about their technology is their publish/subscribe ability, which allows us to do distributed computing. This is why we actually bought it. The way we use it internally mostly has been for actually being able to distribute the workload of assembling personalized e-mail over 150 serverz7As and we’re looking at it there for actually doing live data synchronization between our systems. With TIBCO middleware, the hope is to actually be able to integrate systems together and then eventually also integrate external partners, like us. Think of Office XP, what it could become. When you’re in Excel, you have the ability to connect right through our data center. And this happens all through HTTP. This is how we’ve taken someone’s Excel implementation that they have on their desktop and integrated it with our infrastructure on the back end. And there’s no issue around firewalls, which is another nice thing about Web services. InfoWorld: So what needs to happen next then to move things forward? Capiel: Well, it all sounds great because we could go through the firewall, but the amount of overhead that HTTP builds on top means that the application all of a sudden works really slowly. So even though we finally perfected it where it still talks HTTP and we manage to compress everything, if we take a step back and make it truly .Net compliant this would break down again because of all the overhead with XML and all the overhead with SOAP. So what we did is we only implemented the HTTP piece which allows us to go through the firewall. We did a lot of workarounds and got it to that point where it’s actually fairly reliable and it works really well. But if we had gone with a true Web services implementation, it would be a performance pig. But I think that problem will go away a year or two from now as networks get better and there’s more bandwidth. The other thing we did is we did a ton of caching on the client and on the server and that helped with the performance a lot. But you can’t cache everything. InfoWorld: What one thing does Digital Impact need to be successful? Capiel: The thing that’s going to help us most is for people to really start feeling much more comfortable with the fact that they don’t have to have full control over their data. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in-house; and in fact they should realize that they’re already exposed anyway, so you might as well embrace it. Companies say they are not going to post e-mail addresses outside of their datacenter. But every time you send an e-mail campaign, those names go out unencrypted, so your data is already outside of your network. As we overcome that, things are going to get a little easier. Software Development