In a game of "Six Degrees of XML," General Motors and XMLSolutions would be only one degree apart.
That's because Ron Shelby, CEO of McLean-based XMLSolutions, first took interest in XML's potential for B2B applications while he served in executive positions at General Motors in the late 1990s.
While moving from a position at a car manufacturer to the head of an XML infrastructure software start--up may seem like quite a leap, Shelby says it isn't for someone interested in XML.
The tag-based language is rapidly becoming the lingua franca for transferring data between systems in B2B solutions. Much of the bleeding-edge XML work is happening in vertical markets, such as the automotive industry, which is driving XML standards in the B2B market.
At GM, Shelby found himself in the thick of that work. "Back in '98 and '99 as CTO at General Motors, I was really impressed with how straightforward it was to work in XML," he says.
Shelby also served as CIO of e-GM,GM's internal e-company,during his tenure there.
While at e-GM, Shelby spearheaded a project that used XML to enable voice interaction with the GM Web site.
"We used VXML [voice XML] to transform data from legacy systems to the Web site to voice," says Shelby.
Shelby then took his XML experience to XMLSolutions when he became CEO in August.
XMLSolutions Vice President of Marketing Daryn Walters and a team of engineers formed the company in June 1999 to advance the use of XML for e-procurement in B2B exchanges.
XMLSolutions' product set is geared toward helping companies using EDI,a more expensive, older technology for enterprise applications integration,to transfer data between systems using XML.
Earlier this month, XMLSolutions launched its Business Integration Platform to achieve this end.
The platform enables companies to share realtime information with trading partners and marketplaces regardless of which XML dialect they are using, Walters says.
"Our application allows our customers to become XML--dialect--independent. We've simplified a complicated problem set," Walters says.
Kate Fessenden, research director with the enterprise XML division at Aberdeen Group, agrees. In just over a year, XMLSolutions has become a leader in the emerging market to provide infrastructure for companies that allows them to transfer data to and from EDI-based systems using XML, she says.
"[Their products] enable someone to be able to conduct those transactions regardless of where they are or in what format," Fessenden says.
She cites XMLSolutions' Schema Central product as particularly valuable, since it enables the bi-directional, cross-dialect transfer of data in e-procurement transactions.
"It can read any schema. Data comes in [to the system] in one [schema], goes back out the other," Fessenden says.
XMLSolutions also has done much of the work for new companies looking for a painless entry into e-procurement, she adds.
"[XMLSolutions] has between 3,000 and 4,000 documents that have already been mapped to their XML repository, so if you're a new company you don't have to do any of those," she says.
Fessenden points out this is quite the value proposition for a small company looking to do business on a major-league level.
"It has always been so expensive [to do EDI transactions]. Now you have access to doing business with large companies because you can do this over the Internet," Fessenden says.
Ken Persing, e-commerce manager for New Hope, Minn.-based Navarre, a software distributor, says another of XMLSolutions' products,the XEDI-XML translator,has helped Navarre interface seamlessly with an online retailer that works in XML.
"They send us purchase orders in XML and the [XEDI-XML] converts it to EDI to get to our back office. It gives me a streamlined way of giving customers what they want without having to jump through a lot of hoops," Persing says.
