UniCapital Corporation announced it has published an XML schema on Microsoft’s BizTalk Web site that will enable commercial equipment leasing companies to exchange invoices with customers over the Internet. UniCapital expects that this schema will facilitate e-commerce in the $220 billion equipment leasing industry by providing companies with a universally compatible program for filing invoices electronically. By developing a standard e-commerce language for invoicing, UniCapital expects its schema to result in cost savings and increased operating efficiencies for equipment leasing companies and their customers. www.unicapitalcorp.com
Month: December 1999 (Page 4 of 11)
Bidcom, Inc. announced that the company has been elected to lead the Construction/Project Management working group, one of six such groups that make up the aecXML Project. Larry Chen, chief technology officer at Bidcom, will chair the group on Bidcom’s behalf. The aecXML Project www.aecxml.org is a building industry consortium founded by Bentley Systems in August 1999 to standardize the definition and exchange of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) data. Based on XML, aecXML will use an XML schema to describe the information that is routinely exchanged between building industry professionals. Using this schema, industry companies will be able to share project information and conduct e-commerce across all software applications. More than 450 organizations worldwide are participating in the aecXML project. In addition to Construction/Project Management, aecXML working groups address the following areas: Design/Estimating/Scheduling/Cost Management, Product Catalogs, Procurement, Operations/Maintenance/Facility, Management, and Plant. aecXML is a framework for using XML in the architectural, engineering and construction industries. It includes an XML schema to describe information specific to the information exchanges between participants involved in designing, constructing and operating buildings, plants, infrastructure and facilities. The various software applications used by these participants can transfer messages formatted according to the aecXML schema to coordinate and synchronize related project information. In addition, a standard aecXML specification will facilitate e-commerce between suppliers and purchasers of equipment, materials, supplies, parts and services based on that same technical information. www.aecxml.org, www.bidcom.com
MERANT unveiled DataDirect Connect for XML. DataDirect Connect for XML reduces the amount of work required to implement XML for data integration, helping customers rapidly implement business-to-business systems. MERANT’s new XML technology will be key to helping companies rapidly adopt XML, providing a way to exchange and integrate data across standard tools and applications like Microsoft Visual Basic, Seagate Info and Allaire ColdFusion. DataDirect Connect for XML provides SQL capabilities to applications accessing XML data, increasing customer flexibility, speeding deployment of new applications and leveraging existing skills and tools. DataDirect Connect for XML is one of the technologies fundamental to helping companies implement MERANT’s Egility Data Integration solution for e-business. The MERANT Egility Data Integration solution combines products and services that help extend the effectiveness of data in the enterprise value chain, enabling rapid and dynamic access to integrated information for an organization’s customers, partners, suppliers and employees. MERANT Egility Data Integration empowers businesses for change by equipping them with a data integration strategy to respond to rapidly changing market dynamics. www.merant.com
Binary Evolution, Inc. announced the release of VelociGen 2.0, an upgrade to their application server, which improves web server performance. The 2.0 release also includes extensions for parsing and manipulating XML documents. The most common cause of slow web site performance is the web server’s inability to respond quickly, due to the bottleneck of CGIs accessing information from the database. VelociGen solves this problem by enabling the web server to respond at speeds that are 25 times faster than CGI scripts. This results in web customers receiving faster replies to their requests. VelociGen gains its speed advantages by maintaining persistent Perl and Tcl processing engines, pooling database connections, and byte-compiling and caching scripts. As a web site’s traffic increases, VelociGen’s scalable, load-balancing architecture allows easy expansion of capacity to meet the demand. Applications based on VelociGen can be developed once on a single platform then deployed onto nearly any platform, any operating system and any database. VelociGen installs on UNIX and Microsoft NT Servers and interacts with database engines via industry-standard protocols such as ODBC and SQL. Perl and Tcl extensions exist for many commercial and freely available database servers including Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB2, Mysql and Msql, or any other ODBC compliant database. Extensions also exist for manipulating GIF images and generating graphs and charts. VelociGen runs on Sun-Netscape iPlanet Web Server, Netscape Fasttrack/Enterprise Server, Apache, Microsoft IIS/PWS, O’Reilly WebSite Pro, or any other ISAPI compatible web server. Platforms supported are Windows NT Intel, Solaris SPARC, SGI IRIX, HP-UX, AIX and Linux Intel. www.binevolve.com
Tumbleweed Communications KK, a subsidiary of Tumbleweed Communications Corp. announced that Toyo Information Systems Co., Ltd., Hewlett Packard Japan Co., Ltd., and Tokyo Matsushita Computer Corp. have become their partners to promote Tumbleweed Integrated Messaging Exchange (IME) to the Japanese market. Tumbleweed IME is a set of products and services that leverage the Internet and existing e-mail networks to create a secure communications channel for e-business. Toyo Information Systems plans to offer IME as part of its systems integration services and has also announced that it intends to outsource IME services to its customers. The company intends to offer a service called “Web Postman,” targeted first to financial corporations and also to manufacturing and retail. HP Japan and Tokyo Matsushita Computer will become resellers, selling IME through their strong Japanese sales channels. HP is currently promoting its E-services business worldwide and sees IME as a solution for billing and delivery. HP will pursue channel sales using their strong business network, and Tumbleweed will provide technical support to their customers. Tokyo Matsushita first plans to sell IME through the sales organization of the Matsushita Group and is evaluating other new market opportunities. www.tumbleweed.com
Art Technology Group, Inc. and net.Genesis Corp. announced a strategic technology and joint marketing alliance aimed at providing companies with the business-critical information necessary to increase the effectiveness of business-rule driven Web site interactions. As part of the alliance, the two companies will develop and market a custom release of net.Genesis’ net.Analysis applications, including net.Instrument for Dynamo and CartSmarts for Dynamo, that will provide the business manager with the tools necessary to capture, measure and correlate online behavior on Web sites based on ATG’s Dynamo product suite. The combined solution will allow visitor actions and events that occur within Dynamo to be captured and analyzed, enabling businesses to improve strategic and tactical decision making about marketing, selling and supporting products online. The solution will allow personalization-driven business rules generated from within Dynamo to be quickly and accurately adjusted based on net.Analysis’ data collection and analysis capabilities to enhance the effectiveness of personalized Web-based interactions. A business manager can then use this analysis to develop refined content targeting rules, navigational flows, content groupings and categorization, targeted product offerings and other personalization business rules. By tailoring site content and features in such a manner, businesses can satisfy the preferences of their most valuable customers, improve the conversion of customers, and build loyalty based upon understanding the customer’s key factors and influences on his or her purchase decision-making. www.netgen.com, www.atg.com
The HR-XML Consortium announced that more than 25 organizations have endorsed an XML framework designed to enable web-based workforce management and recruiting services. Based on open, business-to-business e-commerce models, these next- generation workforce management and recruiting services promise to deliver employers greater ROI for their staffing expenditures, while giving HR and staffing vendors new opportunities for growth and profit. The HR-XML Consortium is a newly formed non-profit group dedicated to the development and promotion of standardized human-resources-related XML vocabularies for enabling business-to-business e-commerce and the automation of inter-company exchanges of human resources data. Staffing and Recruiting is the first of many HR areas that the HR-XML Consortium will standardize. www.icarian.com
A “dialect” of XML specifically designed to let on-line businesses and service providers manage the delivery of services to their customers across extranets has been developed by Manage.Com. The new manageXML language enables users of Manage.Com’s FrontLine e.M eBusiness management software to create a set of document-like descriptions of managed objects, including Internet infrastructure devices, transactions and business processes. The documents, which establish inter-object relationships and dependencies, supply FrontLine e.M with the basis for provisioning services and taking corrective action. manageXML can model not only physical objects but also logical entities. This is essential in representing logical objects such as managed services, for example, and modeling eCommerce sessions that simulate a user’s progress through a series of transactions. manageXML has four major components: object data sources, object definitions, service management logic and service control panels. manageXML Included with manageXML is an Authoring Kit that provides software tools, templates, examples and documentation designed to facilitate the creation, validation and testing of manageXML documents. Key components of the kit include manageXML authoring tools, which help vendors and integrators wishing to build new manageXML documents using previously defined vendor-specific documents or transfer managed definitions originally created as SNMP MIBs; the manageXML static validator, which ensures correct syntax and format of documents created in manageXML; and a manageXML object validator, which enables correct formation of manageXML documents. manageXML and the manageXML Authoring Kit are available free of charge to users of Manage.Com’s FrontLine e.M software. In addition, an initial set of manageXML documents, developed by Manage.Com, is available now for six managed objects: Windows NT, IIS, SQLServer, Microsoft Exchange, MIB II and the Cisco 2500/7000 routers. A second set of documents, to be available in January, will cover HTTP transactions, UNIX, Oracle, Apache, Netscape Enterprise Server, Check Point Firewall-1, POP3, Cisco Catalyst 5000 and Cisco PIX Firewall. www.manage.com
