Dow Jones & Company announced it is providing its Market Data Markup Language to a financial industry consortium as a starting point toward development of an XML-based global standard for market data delivery. The Market Data Markup Language (MDML), developed by Dow Jones is now posted at www.fisd.net, the web site of the Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). The FISD — a forum for business and technical issues related to the distribution of financial information — recently formed a working group to coordinate XML efforts in the market data industry. Dow Jones contributed its MDML to speed development of a common framework to publish market data. The Dow Jones MDML has been in production for about two years at The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. The language is used for posting text and statistical data on the web site, and as a system interchange format within Dow Jones and with entities such as Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters. The FISD market data work will be done in coordination with other XML initiatives, including XBRL, or Extensible Business Reporting Language. The XBRL consortium (www.xbrl.org) is developing XML vocabularies for corporate earnings and regulatory filings. Dow Jones, Reuters Group, and Reuters’ Lipper subsidiary are all participants in XBRL. The FISD effort also dovetails with two XML standards developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, of which Dow Jones, Associated Press, and Reuters are all members: NewsML is an XML model for packaging and managing news objects of any media type; the News Industry Text Format is an XML application for markup of news text. www.fisd.net

DataChannel Inc. and Talk2 Technology, Inc. announced a strategic alliance today that will allow users to access and voice-navigate through the DataChannel EIP. The companies have entered into a joint development and marketing agreement integrating DataChannel’s DataChannel Server (DCS) 4.1 and Talk2’s ViPrNET (pronounced “Vipernet”) voice infrastructure. Using a telephone, enterprise customers may now access and interact with their enterprise information anywhere, anytime. Talk2’s proprietary ViPrNET architecture is a carrier-class technology, capable of supporting tens-of-millions of users. ViPrNET runs on high performance, Unix-based computing platforms and is technology and platform agnostic. The integration of the two products is founded on DataChannel’s XML development and the two companies’ commitment to an XML-based architecture. These complimentary technologies ensure that voice access to critical information can scale with the growth of the EIP to potentially millions of users. Since EIP users access mission-critical information, security of the corporate firewall is extended by ViPrNET’s Spontaneous Virtual Private Networking technology (sVPN). Each time a user dials into the portal to access information–on any device–the sVPN creates a secure session without having to modify the existing firewall, giving users seamless, high-security access to their information. www.talk2.com, www.datachannel.com

IXOS Software AG and 80-20 Software have signed a partnership agreement. Both companies will work jointly on the next generation of the IXOS-ExchangeARCHIVE product line. The partnership will provide global enterprise customers with comprehensive knowledge and eBusiness document management solutions. First joint products are expected to be launched in early 2001. The partnership covers joint product development and joint marketing for the 80-20 product line, which includes the retrieval server 80-20 Discovery and the personal portal 80-20 Retriever. 80-20 Discovery is able to arrange information according to concepts rather than keywords. 80-20 Retriever is a new personal portal, embedded in Microsoft Outlook, which uses automatic categorization technology, and is designed to handle personal file and email management. Both companies see significant growth opportunities by providing integrated solutions for the new Microsoft Exchange platform and the forthcoming portal and document management server, codenamed “Tahoe”. www.ixos.com, www.80-20.com

eBusiness Technologies (eBT) announced that it has entered into a strategic alliance with Epicentric, Inc. The alliance combines Epicentric’s ability to establish a network of e-business centers within a common management structure with eBusiness Technologies’ content management and workflow automation capabilities. Epicentric’s solutions combine various sources of information and tools — outside syndicators, internal data streams and Web-based applications — and enable its customers to provide custom interfaces and different views of those data sources. eBT’s engenda content management and workflow automation solution helps organizations manage the information from various content sources as well as original content. The alliance agreement calls for the two companies to jointly develop a tight integration of their products, providing the customers a streamlined way of managing content through the portal environment. www.epicentric.com, www.ebt.com