IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

Web services and content management

Web services are ideally suited for being incorporated into content management systems, says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink.

“XML is a document format,” he notes and is ideally suited for represented semi-structured documents, which means documents that include both regularly structured information like forms, as well as unstructured information inside the forms and between the forms.

Because XML is at the heart of Web services as well, there is a natural affinity between content management systems and Web services. Because of this, “major content management companies use XML to represent content in their systems,” he says.

But there are more important reasons that Web services are being used increasingly in content management systems, he contends. Because content is now being seen not just as static data, but an important part of an enterprise’s infrastructure, “there’s a whole other side to the picture. Can we actually take the content itself and treat it like a service, like any other service, such as a database or an application server?”

Read more at: InternetNews

ZapNote: BroadVision

Download File

ZapNote: Interwoven

Download File

ZapNote: Documentum

Download File

ZapNote: ArborText

Download File

XML in the Content Lifecycle

The process of creating content — information meant for human consumption — is almost always extremely effort-intensive. People must spend time organizing information prior to creation, constructing the content, and laying out the information so that it is easily read. With so much time, cost, and effort invested in content, it makes sense to reduce costs by reusing content as much as possible. Furthermore, content-oriented processes involve a complex set of interactions that progress in a “Content Lifecycle” consisting of five major stages: content creation, management, publishing, syndication, and protection. Each of these phases requires different technologies, processes, and resources.

By rearchitecting content representation technologies to treat content as another asset in the corporate IT infrastructure, businesses can realize the benefits long promised to us by reusable and agile content. But first, we need to move from ad-hoc content creation to content componentization, and then to content services. XML and Web Services are the key to this transition that can help organizations maximize the value of their content.

XML in Financial Services

The Financial Services Sector covers a wide range of businesses and industries revolving around the management and exchange of financial instruments. There are a number of factors that contribute to financial service’s role as a leading implementer of XML technologies. The potential opportunities and pitfalls, and current ways in which XML is being used by this industry sector are explored in detail in this report.

Big growth seen for content products

The market for XML-based content-lifecycle products–software and services that allow content to be easily reused in a number of formats–will grow tenfold to $11.6 billion in annual revenue by 2008, according to a report released Thursday.

ZapThink, a research firm focusing on XML and Web services, said in the report that tools based on XML, the lingua franca of Web services, represent the best hope for modernizing outdated content systems.

“The world of writing and managing content is basically where computing was in the 1980s,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst for ZapThink. “Everything else has been automated, but content is still cut and paste.”

Read more at: CNet News.com

XML in the Content Lifecycle

Download File