WITH THE EXPLOSION of activity in business-to-business e-commerce, the ability to integrate applications in a timely manner has become a crucial IT requirement. One of the companies that has benefited most in this space is webMethods, a provider of enterprise application integration (EAI) software based on XML. Speaking with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Phillip Merrick, the CEO of webMethods, talks about the trends that are driving what is expected to be a $12 billion market by 2003.

InfoWorld: How much activity are you seeing in this space?

Merrick: Integration platforms are providing the glue that links all of the applications, exchanges, and business processes together in this increasingly more complex environment that's being created, particularly around the push toward b-to-b e-commerce and collaboration. We have, in the third calendar quarter or so, just seen a terrific amount of momentum in our business. For instance, we had 88 new customers for a total of about 550 or so now. We've grown to almost 1,000 people worldwide. And we've been expanding aggressively internationally, also working on solidifying partnerships with other major players such as Ariba, SAP, and so forth.

InfoWorld: So is XML, then, a silver bullet for application integration?

Merrick: We've been a major advocate of XML, and in fact we're the first company to apply XML to the problems of application and business-to-business integration. But XML alone is not enough. You need a whole infrastructure around it. You need application integration. You need a robust scalable software server infrastructure to actually move all documents reliably around the network. You need security, and so on and so on. XML itself is just a tagging language.

InfoWorld: How many variants of XML are there?

Merrick: The point about there being so many variants of XML is a little bit misleading. XML was designed from the ground up to support multiple vocabularies. The X stands for extensible. There is only one XML, XML 1.0 from the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. What you see, though, are lots of different vocabularies on top of it, so you've got vocabularies in the IT supply chain as part of Rosetta.net. You've got vocabularies for procurement, the likes of CXML from Ariba and XCBL from Commerce One. Now in many cases, these vocabularies are for specific domains, specific vertical industries, or specific applications, like procurement. This was part of the way this was all supposed to roll out. I will concede, though, that the world probably doesn't need to have competing vocabularies for things like b-to-b procurement, and it would be great to see these things come together at some point.

InfoWorld: How do you view the term

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine