The markup language barrier

Arriving at a standard in the communications industry is an evolutionary process that does not work in Internet time. Standards emerge from painstaking trial and error, reaction to economic drivers and widespread adaptation by market leaders. As soon as a standard is set, something new emerges.

Much of the operations support system community has used CORBA for about the last year to develop solutions for interconnection and interoperability. Now, a variant could alter CORBA's course. It is the extensible markup language (XML).

XML uses an English-like meta-language structure that separates content from the presentation layer, making it more efficient when interpreting and using data - a critical requirement for e-commerce.

Perhaps the most immediate advantage of XML is its ability to work with electronic data interchange to address one of interconnection's biggest headaches: the continual revision of business rules between trading partners.

The Internet and e-commerce are driving some industry leaders to XML. Microsoft, MetaSolv Software and Quintessent Communications are leading the charge.

"XML is the language of e-commerce," said a Quintessent spokesman.

Microsoft, a growing influence in telecom support systems, supports XML as the preferred method of interconnection for systems that increasingly rely on the Internet.

"We see XML as the key to making data interchange very open and very extensible," said Chris VandenBerg, group program manager for Microsoft. Microsoft is investing human resources to the World Wide Web Consortium effort to define XML building blocks. "XML is so important to how you interconnect with all your support systems," he said.

Quintessent demonstrated its XML-based toolkit QConnect Studio this month at OSS 2000 in Orlando. QConnect uses XML to standardize the description of data and business rules for exchanging electronic documents.

XML is closely associated with HTML. HTML is used for presenting text and graphical data and XML defines that data and determines the format for presentation. "XML is complementary to HTML. It's not a replacement," said Joe Herzog, director business development at Quintessent.

Having the tools is not enough. XML needs backing from incumbent and competitive local exchange carriers.

"It would take big ILECs and CLECs to drive the market toward XML. [XML interconnection] may happen in the DSL market, but the standards will come out of organizations like [the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions]," Herzog said.

Bolstered by continued success in the marketplace, MetaSolv is taking a position on XML. "As a market leader, we need to build toward an XML standard. We want to get to XML," said Jim Janicki, president and CEO of MetaSolv.

But adopting XML does not necessarily mean abandoning CORBA.

"CORBA is ready now, and we're ready to do the evolution when it's not the best thing. But right now, it's the best architecture for a client/server relationship, and CORBA 3 is on its way," said Jean Lawlis, senior manager of product management at Lucent Technologies.

CORBA's benefits include an open standard, integration with Java, interoperability with C++ objects and dynamic discovery. It has had some performance and scalability issues, some of which are being resolved with carrier-class object request brokers.

"CORBA is a very natural environment for programmers. Is CORBA the ultimate solution? Of course not," Lawlis said. "Will XML replace CORBA? I don't know what will come after CORBA, but right now, it's CORBA time.