Where Microsoft Corp’s XML strategy stops Object Design Inc, the ‘last man standing’ in the pure object database market, plans to pick it up: at the server. ODI this week unfurls Excelon, an XML makeover of its ObjectStore distributed caching technology plus indexing, modeling and querying services for delivering enterprise application data into XML. Most other XML servers are focused on textual support. ODI says Excelon will enable numerical data to be stripped from stock, supply chains, sales and manufacturing applications, transformed and stored in its XML repository (ObjectStore is embedded) and transplanted into XML- enabled ERP, decision support and reporting applications. It’s looking to hitch a ride on the EAI enterprise application integration bandwagon. ODI says customers would also be able to retrieve product data from web sites deploying Excelon and paste it straight into their expense application or Excel spreadsheet. Indeed Dell, which hopes to generate 50% of its business from its web site by 2001, has been looking at the work. ODI had Microsoft XML honcho Adam Bosworth present Excelon to its user group meeting last week but says there’s nothing Redmond-centric about the technology itself. It’s just that Microsoft is very aggressive about XML’s use, such as in iInternet Explorer 5.0, says ODI, and wants to pick up where Microsoft is leaving off. While Excelon ships initially on NT in the first quarter, it will also be available for Solaris in a subsequent release. Excelon is designed to slot in alongside existing application and web servers, ODI says. Excelon includes a Studio component for getting XML documents out of databases and applications. Customers can use ISVs’ own XML adapters, other adapters including ODBC or WebMethods’ B2B server, which ODI is to resell. It uses the WIDL web-enabled version of the IDL interface definition language to suck data out or screen scrapes HTML into XML. The resulting XML documents are dragged and dropped into the repository (ObjectStore) using Excelon Explorer (the Microsoft metaphor continues). ODI says Studio and Explorer resolve the performance problems users will face in doing the data extraction/transformation work themselves using vendors’ XML adapters which will requires a runtime join being performed on each query. It bought the Excelon data modeling, indexing and querying capabilities at the heart of the product from XML data management company Inso Corp which created an XML version of ObjectStore. It wouldn’t reveal how much it paid but claimed it was not much. ODI believes XML is a killer application for ObjectStore and will over time become it main revenue-earner, though it’s not the company’s entire future. ODI claims 3,000 ObjectStore customers. It has yet to roll out a product program built around its give-away PSE embedded database. That it’s just about the last pure object database play does not in itself represent a victory ODI says: It will not make us successful, it’s a niche market. Which is why it’s doing XML and embedded work. Rumors that it’s a Microsoft acquisition target continue to abound even though a significant chunk of ODI is owned by IBM Corp.
