XML Impacting the Enterprise

Tapping into the Power of XML: Five Success Stories

Table of Contents
1 | Introduction and XML Servers: Enhancing and Improving the XML Experience
2 | Five Success Stories: XML Servers in the Real World
3 | Elsevier Case Study
4 | Reed Business International (RBI) Case Study
5 | JPMorgan Chase & Co. Case Study
6 | Datamonitor Case Study
7 | JetBlue Case Study
8 | The Benefits of XML Servers
9 | Conclusion
XML Impacting the Enterprise
Tapping into the Power of XML: Five Success Stories

XML: A Brief (and Successful) History

XML was introduced 10 years ago to improve the exchange of content over the web and enable
linking of siloed content repositories. Today it is experiencing a surge in popularity. Both
businesses and government agencies are embracing XML in large numbers. In a 2008 survey
of 700 software development professionals using XML in multiple industries worldwide , 64%
said their companies are expanding the overall amount of data they store in XML. Sixty-nine
percent said the number of XML files in their organization is growing.

In just a few years, we’ve seen the arrival—and widespread adoption—of a number of new and
innovative uses for XML:

Office Open XML: With the advent of Microsoft Office 2007, a version of XML called Office
Open XML or Open XML became the underlying format for all Office documents.

Standard XML Schemas: XML schemas, which describe particular types of XML documents,
are now available for many industries. These include the financial products markup language
(FPML), Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) for technical information, and keyhole
markup language (KML) for geographic information.

Web 2.0: XML enables popular web 2.0 capabilities like tagging, rating, annotating, and com-
menting by allowing users to easily mark-up, add to, and enhance content.

SOA/Web Services: Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and web services are increasingly
popular because they simplify the exchange of data among heterogeneous systems. SOA and web
services are based on XML standards, including the simple object access protocol (SOAP)—
a specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services—and
web services description language (WSDL), which provides a model for describing web services.

XQuery: The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) adopted XQuery as the XML query standard
in January 2007. Increasing numbers of major software vendors—like Oracle and IBM—support
this standard, leading to more XQuery books, training, and classes.

Federal Government Initiatives: Numerous initiatives require federal agencies to employ XML.
XML is a key component of the emerging federal enterprise architecture (FEA), which provides a
common methodology for IT acquisition, use, and disposal in the federal government. XML is a focus
of the Emerging Technology group of the Federal CIO Architecture and Infrastructure Committee.
The E-Government Act of 2002, which recommends the use of standards and guidelines for inter-
connectivity and interoperability, has also included XML among its recommended standards.

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It’s now even easier to take advantage of XML
thanks to XML servers designed specifically
for applications that rely on XML content.
Organizations can load all relevant content
into an XML server to create a content
platform that allows them to rapidly build and
deploy applications to meet a wide variety of
information access and delivery needs.
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These developments have helped influ-
ence XML’s growing popularity. But there
is another key factor in the XML success
story—the XML server.
XML Servers: Enhancing and
Improving the XML Experience
It’s now even easier to take advantage
of XML thanks to XML servers designed
specifically for applications that rely on XML
content. An XML server is built specifically
for XML content and uses that content in its
native format. Organizations can load all rel-
evant content into an XML server, creating a
content platform that allows them to rapidly
build and deploy applications to meet a wide
variety of information access and delivery
needs. The platform helps them increase
use of content through dynamic publishing
applications that can be tied into business
processes.
Some of the key capabilities of an XML
server include:
Native XML storage—An XML server uses
XML as its native storage format and is built
specifically for XML content. It allows or-
ganizations to load any XML in any structure
directly into the repository. This eliminates
the need for administrators to maintain
multiple structures and indexes for managing
content, reducing maintenance costs, and
improving performance.
Comprehensive search—Accessing the right
content starts with search. An XML server
combines full-text search, XML search, and
geospatial search to find content. XQuery
support allows users to retrieve the content
at a granular level—paragraph, chapter, cap-
tion, section—for reassembly and delivery.
Powerful content analysis—Before organi-
zations can exploit content, they need to
understand what they have. XML servers
offer analytic capabilities that characterize
an organizations’ content, such as number of
authors, pages, or images. The analysis also
feeds rich visual interfaces for exploring con-
tent— such as faceted navigation , tag clouds
or heat maps—that guide users to information
more quickly.
High performance—XML servers combine
various techniques to improve performance
including advanced clustering, parallel
processing of queries and threading to take
advantage of multi-core architectures.
Delivering content to a browser in XML via
an application is much more efficient than
having to transform content into other
formats or storage models. A solution that
includes a web server can serve HTML or
XHTML directly to the browser, avoiding
potential bottlenecks or latency issues.
Additionally, a universal index that indexes
text and structure allows users to receive
specific information quickly. The index can
be optimized automatically to improve
performance.
Ease of integration —XML servers can easily
integrate with any third-party product either
natively through XML and XQuery or through
Java and .Net, becoming a “hub” in a system
architecture and allowing different applica-
tions that speak XML to work together. This
means an organization could use a content
management system with capabilities such
as sign in/out, versioning, and workflow to
create content, store content in the XML
server, and pull content directly into a design
tool like FrameMaker.
We’ve described some of the critical compo-
nents of an XML server and how it combines
with XML to increase its overall flexibility.
But how does an XML server work in real
organizations facing complex, real-world
challenges?
Five Success Stories:
XML Servers in the Real World
Today many of the world’s top organiza-
tions are using XML servers to solve their
toughest information access and delivery
challenges. Following are the success stories
of five industry leaders who are increasing
agility, benefit 2 and benefit 3, with the help
of MarkLogic Server.
Elsevier
A world-leading publisher of scientific, tech-
nical, and medical information products and
services, Elsevier is the science and medical
publishing division of Reed Elsevier Group
plc. Elsevier supplies more than 30 million
scientists, students, and health information
professionals worldwide with 20,000+ prod-
ucts and services that help them conduct
research, perform experiments, aid patients,
and more.
Challenge
Elsevier has long invested in digitizing content,
amassing vast repositories of medical and
scientific information, and making it available
via a range of online database-driven solu-
tions. As Elsevier’s content grew, its customers
began spending more time refining searches to
find relevant content. Elsevier wanted to help
customers extract only the pieces of content
they needed and maximize its value by letting
them flexibly combine procedures, techniques,
and best practices.
Elsevier had stored its vast content
repositories—five million full text articles
from 1,800 journals; more than 60 million
citations and abstracts; 20,000 print books;
9,000 out-of-print books; and thousands
of pamphlets—in multiple databases in 35
different file formats. To help customers find
content more easily, the company decided to
migrate it to a single platform.
Initially, Elsevier moved the content to XML
and used an RDBMS to create a central-
ized document repository. This allowed the
company to deconstruct and synthesize
documents into content-specific results. But
to obtain reasonable performance from the
RDBMS, it needed to pre-define schemas and
access paths—time-consuming tasks.
1 www.wikipedia.org [Schema] A schema is a way to define the structure, content and, to some extent, the
semantics of XML documents
2 www.wikipedia.org [Index] (publishing) A detailed list, usually arranged alphabetically, of the specific informa-
tion in a publication
Solution
In the end, Elsevier decided to replace its RD-
BMS with MarkLogic Server. This allowed the
company to develop applications that store
all of its data in a large content repository,
extract exactly the information needed, and
present the content as a new, automatically
created document. Now Elsevier can build
new applications and create value-added
services from the repository very quickly.
Benefits
Because the XML server allows Elsevier to
import content “as is” from many sources, the
company has eliminated the lengthy process
of preparing and normalizing content for the
repository, slashing time-to-availability by
two thirds. The new system also enables rapid
application development without the need for
schemas or DTDs, allowing Elsevier to more
quickly deliver new products to customers.
A complete XQuery implementation delivers
high performance against the multi-terabyte
dataset. The server can search deep inside
documents to access precise sections or
paragraphs, rather than large numbers of
possible documents, allowing users to find
information five to nine times faster than
before.
These role- and task -aware applications
help guide users to results by presenting
information to them in a way that is
consistent with their diagnostic process.
They can work across summary level
information drawn from metadata and
then drill into more specific details when
necessary—and all of the content is
assembled in real time as they navigate.
Most importantly, physicians can work faster
and with greater confidence. By using
Elsevier applications to facilitate the
diagnostic process, physicians spend less
time looking for information and more time
evaluating and healing. And because physi-
cians can more easily compare procedures,
they can also achieve better diagnoses.
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RBI France
Reed Business Information (RBI) is a business-
to-business division of Reed Elsevier Group
Because all the content is XML, RBI France has
PLC, the world’s leading publisher and informa-
eliminated needless transformations, creating
tion provider. RBI provides business profes-
cleaner, faster streamlined process that allows
sionals across five continents with unrivaled
the print production team to leverage the latest
access to communication and information
information. Editors now publish in XML and
channels ranging from magazines to directo-
launch new material on the web in seconds when
ries, conferences, and market research. RBI
ready. The new platform also makes it easier
France is one of nine international operations
to repurpose digital content so RBI France can
hubs and stewards some of the company’s
deliver even more value-added services to its
most popular branded products in Europe.
partners.
Challenge
Because of its laborious content transforma-
tion and production process, RBI France was
struggling to get new products to market
quickly and provide value-added services
to its customers. The company had been
Solution
To streamline its production processes, RBI
France worked with MarkLogic to create a
custom, enterprise-wide content manage-
ment and production system. The solution
stored all of RBI France’s XML content in a
centralized repository, enabled deep, fine-
grained queries across publishing verticals,
and preserved and enriched meta data to im-
prove image archive management and reuse.
The system includes workflow functionality
to speed and ease production and content
management of the publisher’s books, maga-
zines, website applications, and partner of-
ferings. And it allows for direct connections
to and from the editors’ preferred in-house
layout and design tools, including Adobe
FrameMaker and InDesign.
Benefits

using XML to tag and index content and SQL Because all the content is XML, RBI France

Server as its content repository. When they has eliminated needless transformations,

needed to reuse content, they were forced creating a cleaner, faster streamlined proc-

to export selected content into XML and ess that allows the print production team

reprocess it for publishing. RBI France would to leverage the latest information. Editors

then export the new pages out of XML for now publish in XML and launch new material

re-storage in the database. This meant the on the web in seconds when ready. The new

production department had to print content platform also makes it easier to repurpose

first and then load it on the internet, signifi- digital content so RBI France can deliver even

cantly slowing the update process. more value-added services to its partners.

RBI France resells its professional content to

business partners, such as banks, consumer
sites, retail outlets, and technology companies,
who in turn leverage this custom, industry-
specific content to send to their end custom-
ers. But due to the flawed production process,
it was difficult and expensive for RBI France to
repurpose content for its partners.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a leading global
financial services firm with assets of $2.0
trillion and operations in more than 60
countries. The firm is a leader in investment
banking, financial services for consumers,
commercial banking, financial transaction
processing, asset management, and private
equities.
Benefits
Thanks to the new system, JP Morgan Chase
delivers timely research to 80,000 users
worldwide, improving customer satisfac-
tion and competitive advantage. By alerting
customers to the availability of critical new
research more quickly, financial traders
gain a definite edge in the office and on the
trading floor.

Challenge
JPMorgan Chase provides financial research
to customers on a subscription basis. Be-
cause every second counts in the fast-paced
world of stock trading, the firm needed to
deliver new research to its subscribers as
quickly as possible to help them make better
decisions about their trades.

Unfortunately, these efforts were hampered

by the firm’s legacy infrastructure. Because of
shortcomings with the current tool they were
not able to easily respond to new requirements
or to fully leverage the XML that was being
created. Additionally they could not meet their
goals for delivering alerts in a timely fashion.

Solution
JPMorgan Chase replaced its legacy system
with a MarkLogic Server. Now the firm can
take full advantage of the research informa-
Thanks to the new system, JP Morgan Chase
tion already being stored in research infor-
delivers timely research to 80,000 users
mation exchange markup language (RIXML)
worldwide, improving customer satisfac-
format. RIXML is an open-industry standard
tion and competitive advantage. By alerting
for categorizing, aggregating, comparing,
customers to the availability of critical new
sorting, and distributing global financial
research more quickly, financial traders gain a
research. The solution drastically reduces
definite edge in the office and on the trading
alert latency and delivers information to the
floor.
customer’s portal and email.

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By creating content as XML, managing it as
XML, and delivering it as XML, Datamonitor has
improved the quality of its content by incorpo-
rating different types of information into new
high-value products. Because the company cre-
ates highly customized products for its custom-
ers, it increases customer intimacy and fosters
a stronger business relationship. And because
the application improves the speed with which
Datamonitor can deliver new products, the
company is frequently first to market.
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Datamonitor
Datamonitor is a leading industry analyst.
5,000+ customers—including industry
analysis, company profiles, news products,
detailed market analysis—use its’ subscrip-
tion-based and custom research and consult-
ing offerings to develop strategic industry
and competitive intelligence. The company
is set apart from the competition thanks to
industry-specific expertise and comprehen-
sive databases that manage acquisition and
revenue figures for each company it covers.
Challenge
Datamonitor believed it could achieve an
advantage in a highly competitive market by
combining quality information into high-value
products. To accomplish this goal, it planned
to hire more content authors and implement
tools that would allow it to create better prod-
ucts with less effort.
However, Datamonitor faced technical
obstacles. The company was using Microsoft
Access for content authoring and Microsoft
SQL server as its data repository. While this
architecture allowed for well-structured and
consistent content products, it was difficult
to modify the system to accommodate new
products or extend existing products.
Also, while it could create content on a local
network, Datamonitor was unable to move
to a browser-based infrastructure. This was
critical as the company increased its content
authoring team from a few dozen people to
well over 600 by opening an office in India.
Additional challenges included content
distributed across multiple siloed systems,
lack of an integrated architecture to support
content reuse, cumbersome content creation
workflow and processes, and the need to
load and process many content formats—
including information scraped from the web.
Solution
Datamonitor deployed MarkLogic Server as
the basis for a content application to manage
and deliver content. The content is all XML and
a mix of structured data (financials and statis-
tics about companies) and content for analysis.
The application integrates with browser-
based authoring and editing tools that sup-
port a team spanning three continents—the
U.S., U.K., and India. These tools work with a
custom-built content management applica-
tion that includes check-in, check-out, and
versioning, implemented within a workflow
system. As users complete editing, new
versions are automatically created; as they
complete tasks, documents are automati-
cally checked in and out.
All of the editing screens and external appli-
cation interactions are executed in XQuery.
The user interface features a number of rich
tools to allow authors to look up content
ranging from Yahoo! ticker systems to 10-K
filings to geography and industry taxono-
mies. The tool is linked to the Factiva infor-
mation dataset, which allows Datamonitor to
leverage the company name and organization
relationships in the Factiva feed.
Benefits
By creating content as XML, managing it as
XML, and delivering it as XML, Datamonitor
has improved the quality of its content by
incorporating different types of information
into new high-value products. Because the
company creates highly customized products
for its customers, it increases customer
intimacy and fosters a stronger business
relationship. And because the application
improves the speed with which Datamonitor
can deliver new products, the company is
frequently first to market.

JetBlue
New York-based JetBlue Airways has created
a new airline category based on value, serv-
ice, and style. Known for its award-winning
service, free TV, and low fares, JetBlue serves
52 cities with 600 daily flights. It is also one
of the first airlines to offer its own Customer
Bill of Rights, with meaningful and specific
compensation for customers inconvenienced
by service disruptions within JetBlue’s
control.
Problem
Previously, JetBlue employed a manually
accessed and maintained document man-
agement system that used the file system
to manage intellectual property such as
regulatory compliance procedures, policies,
and educational materials spanning multiple
departments. But because this intellectual
property resided in multiple disparate sys-
tems, when new regulatory guidance was re-
leased, JetBlue was unable to quickly update
its operating manuals to meet new FAA, IATA,
and/or ICAO requirements. Failure to correct
this situation would have exposed JetBlue to
a range of regulatory actions, including fines,
sanctions, and potential loss of its operating
certificate.
Solution
JetBlue created a content assembly ap-
plication based on MarkLogic Server and
integrated it into its Office 2007/SharePoint
infrastructure. The centralized, scalable XML
repository accommodates a diverse range
of content types, including Microsoft Office
documents and PDF files.
With this platform, subject matter experts
using Microsoft Word can author policies and As the FAA releases new guidance, JetBlue
procedures, re-using information and assem- can also easily track and change the required
bling documents at any level of granularity to topics and publish new information to the right
develop content for different audiences. The people. Ultimately, the company can dynami-
same content can be created once and per- cally deliver the content online and offline in a
sonalized for users based on their role, task, variety of formats to various devices, includ-
location, and area of responsibility. Workflow ing ground servers, PDAs, and disconnected
within SharePoint is used to manage the
pilot laptops.
approval process. As the FAA releases new
guidance, JetBlue can also easily track and
change the required topics and publish new
information to the right people. Ultimately,
the company can dynamically deliver the con-
tent online and offline in a variety of formats
to various devices, including ground servers,
PDAs, and disconnected pilot laptops.
Benefits
With the new system, ground crews, air
crews, training departments, and regulatory
agencies now have reliable and consistent
access to the right information at the
right time. And because users query live
servers rather than fixed content, they are
guaranteed the most current information.
Prior to the new system, a pilot in rough
turbulence might not have time to find
Chapter 7, Section 16 in a 200-page procedure
manual. But with the new system, pilots can
quickly find the correct procedure needed
to deal with a possible engine failure at a
particular altitude.
SharePoint
S Word
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With an XML server, you can tailor information to
the individual user. And when the information is
delivered in XML, it can be displayed across a wide
range of devices and formats.
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The Benefits of XML Servers
The organizations profiled here have imple-
mented just a few of the innovative solutions
made possible with XML servers. And while
each company’s solution is unique, these
organizations have one thing in common—
they’re all reaping the benefits associated
with XML servers.
Centralized information: XML servers store
all content in one place. By administering
and maintaining a single content reposi-
tory, rather than multiple siloed systems,
organizations reduce hardware and mainte-
nance costs. At the same time, users need to
search only in one location to find all relevant
information, rather than looking in numerous
content databases.
Dramatically improved content reuse: Using
modular document capabilities, XML serv-
ers make it easy to re-use content in many
documents to avoid re-creating information.
For example, a single description of a cooling
fan can be used in the manuals for every part
that uses that fan. When the fan is modified,
the description only needs to be changed in
one place.
Fast application development and reduced
costs: Whether an organization wishes
to build new applications or embed XML
content capabilities into existing products,
an XML server—like MarkLogic Server—pro-
vides a single, comprehensive infrastructure
from which to build and deploy applications.
It includes an XML repository, full text and
XML search capabilities, an XQuery engine,
and a web server. So organizations can de-
velop applications more quickly. Those appli-
cations run more efficiently and effectively
because they are on a single platform, saving
time and money.
Delivery of customized content to employ-
ees, customers, and partners: With an XML
server, you can tailor information to the
individual user. And when the information is
delivered in XML, it can be displayed across
a wide range of devices and formats. For
example, an organization might wish to make
different parts of its overall training manual
available to different types of employees on
different devices according to their roles—
sales reviews product descriptions on a PDA,
manufacturing sees product specifications
on a laptop, and marketing receives competi-
tive analysis via desktop.
Enhanced agility: Because XML servers
offer the flexibility to deal with any content
structure without having to know the schema
upfront, organizations can more quickly
and easily load content and run data or
full text queries on-the-fly, without having
to build queries into the application. This
lets organizations quickly react to market
changes, easily aggregate new content, and
agilely build new information products in
response to changing demands and market
conditions. Organizations can experiment
with content and rapidly develop and deploy
new content applications that solve a wide
array of needs, and find new opportunities to
exploit existing content to increase revenue
and operational efficiency.
Conclusion
The adoption of XML has increased signifi-
cantly since it was first introduced 10 years
ago. This is partly due to the development
of new and innovative uses for XML such as
Open Office XML, Web 2.0, SOA/web serv-
ices, and more. But its popularity can also be
attributed to the arrival of XML servers, like
MarkLogic Server.
The combination of XML and XML servers
provides a new level of flexibility that helps
a growing number of industry leaders around
the world meet a wide range of business chal-
lenges and create new business opportuni-
ties. These innovators are tapping into the
raw power of XML servers to benefit from
centralized information, improved content
reuse, faster application development, and
the ability to furnish highly customized con-
tent to employees, partners, and customers.
As a result, these organizations improve their
competitive advantage and become more
agile via their ability to provide value-added
products and services to their customers in a
timely manner.
MarkLogic Server:
The Leading XML Server
Each of the five businesses in this white
paper solved their information challenges
with the help of one XML server in
particular—MarkLogic Server. MarkLogic
Server is the industry’s leading XML server.
Organizations around the world use it to
store, search, analyze, and deliver XML
content. MarkLogic Server uses XML as its
native data format and is built specifically
for content. It has the capabilities of a
large enterprise-class DBMS—storage,
query, update, failover, backup/restore,
and administrative tools. It also provides
a way to manage how XML datasets are
identified, collected, stored, shared, and
built into applications or distributed online
or via printed documents or other media. The
platform lets organizations build XML-based
applications to suit their specific information
access needs. MarkLogic Server is also open
for integration with enterprise systems
involved in the management of content
and publishing processes including content
creation, editing, and workflow.

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 Mark Logic Corporation
www.marklogic.com
Headquarters
999 Skyway Road, Suite 200
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+ 1 650 655 2300
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March 2009 rights reserved. All other product names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.