Bowstreet, which debuted its first product in November 1999, the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory, submitted the first draft specification of the Directory Services Markup Language (DSML), an XML-based proposed standard, to the World Wide Web Consortium, OASIS, and BizTalk standards bodies, in December 1999. The Web Automation Factory is the first product to use DSML. (See http://www.bowstreet.com.)

If you haven't yet heard of DSML, you undoubtedly will. It has garnered the support of industry heavyweights IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and the Sun/Netscape Alliance, who collectively participated in developing the standard. In addition, another 20 companies have rallied around the standard, which is designed to help companies engaging in business-to-business e-commerce share business data from multiple directories within and across organizational boundaries. Consider the challenge: to truly take advantage of B2B e-commerce, a company needs to communicate with multiple partners and their respective systems, yet treat each partner individually.

Craig Muzilla, vice president of marketing at Bowstreet, says that more than 100 vendors have requested to participate at some level in promoting and using DSML.

DSML represents the contents of the directory in XML, so DSML-compliant software will let applications share different directories. Explains Muzilla, LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) provides a standard way to access information within the directory, while DSML provides the standard way to represent the information contained within the directory.

Web Automation Factory lets companies deliver customized business-to-business Web sites for multiple customers and business partners. The idea is that Bowstreet can help companies "mass customize" their B2B Web sites by letting them create, maintain, and link Web sites that provide many tightly integrated B2B connections, with each site customized. That's a complex, costly, and time-consuming proposition, Bowstreet maintains. For example, Muzilla discusses how an insurance company might have 20,000 agents -- all with different policies, prices, geographic locations, and contracts. If such a company wanted to service its agents using the Web, it couldn't simply create one extranet.

To learn more about DSML, ADVISOR Media spoke with Jack Serfass, the co-founder and co-chairman of Bowstreet.

ADVISOR: Describe the bottleneck that DSML is designed to help companies overcome to successfully conduct B2B e-commerce.

SERFASS: It's Bowstreet's view and the members' view that companies have a broader role to play in e-commerce than they traditionally have played. There are three main applications for DSML:
1) The first will be systems management capabilities, in which companies can use the Internet as the backbone to exchange information and synchronize data across directories.
2) Intranet applications -- to take information and make it available across the corporate Internet.
3) E-commerce -- we see a transformation occurring especially in B2B e-commerce companies who are transforming static content into "repurposable" Web services. It could be something as simple as a price quote -- it can be whatever business processes you'd like to expose.

ADVISOR: Can you talk a little bit about the contributions from DSML partners IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun/Netscape? In addition to Bowstreet's Web Automation Factory, when do you expect that we'll see other DSML-compliant products, and what will it mean for products to be DSML-compliant?

SERFASS: Unlike other XML startups, we knew it would be important to have large partners to support DSML, which will have many applications beyond what Bowstreet does. There are several different directory services -- the five major ones are covered by the founding members we've engaged with. Bowstreet already developed a version of DSML to create the Web Automation Factory. We've seen other XML startups do this -- develop a capability and throw it out to the market, but it ends up going nowhere. What we did was work through this, get the technical signoff, and then we've made some modifications. We wanted to have this feedback [of the founding partners] before submitting the technology to the standards bodies, and then get the follow-up support.

All of the companies that have been participating will be building DSML into their products, which we'll start seeing in the next 6-to-12 months.

ADVISOR: The standard's been submitted to the W3C, OASIS, and BizTalk. What happens next in the process?

SERFASS: There are two next steps -- from a standards bodies perspective. The founding members, and new participating companies, will work to get the standards approved, which will hopefully be faster because of the support we've already built.

Also, Bowstreet already has real customer solutions based on DSML, which are centered around bringing sales and distribution channels onto the Internet. Our focus here is to make the standards provide real customer value, with real implementations, and real deployment.

ADVISOR: We're seeing a lot of discussion about creating truly usable Web applications. What's missing in today's B2B applications?

SERFASS: What's happened previously is that people have tried to take a client-server architecture and put it onto the Internet. Pushing client-server onto the Internet is the equivalent of moving COBOL on the mainframe to network computing.

B2B is not a "one-size fits all" proposition. Think of a large sales force, which a company has because it needs to create a lot of relationships, and those relationships are not "one-size fits all."

For example, we're dealing with a large insurance company that has 1,500 people and deals with 40,000 relationships. What won't work is taking a client-server architecture that's designed for large groups of internal users. That approach won't work in B2B.

We've found that there's a certain class of products that are good at one-to-one marketing, and then there are products like Web EDI. But when you try to do rich business processes with high degrees of personalization -- that's where a lot of the processes fall down.

We describe Web services as the task-oriented business processes that are described in XML and assembled on-the-fly based on the business partners' identity in the directory.

The fundamental thing that Bowstreet brings to the table is Web services, and companies like Microsoft have come out saying that Web services is the right methodology for the Internet. What we've seen is that the verdict is out -- client-server is dead on the Web. And that's exciting.

ADVISOR: Can you talk about how XML is evolving, and how it will impact DSML?

SERFASS: What's the industry trend with XML -- if you truly believe that there's going to be a trillion dollars in moving business onto the Internet [as predicted by Forrester Research], then there's no competition with XML. There will actually be more XML services on the Internet than there will be static Web pages.

The first thing that you realize is the need for a radical transformation on the Internet to create "repurposable" Web services. That's a huge trend.

We've seen two approaches at customer sites -- a technology driven approach and a business problem driven approach.

The business problem that XML is well suited to is for processes that require a lot of customization, and to combine information to cross-sell and up-sell.

ADVISOR: Are people confused by the various "flavors" of XML?

SERFASS: Think about how many languages people use. There will be many vocabularies of XML -- I would predict something like 2,500 in the next two years. Figuring out "What am I trying to accomplish?" will help you select the ones [XML standards] that are appropriate.

At Bowstreet we invented the ability to automate working with many vocabularies. For example, we can take DSML and translate it into RosettaNet or cXML.

With the directory, you want to be able to plug and play different vocabularies, and many times it won't be a one-to-one translation.

The other big thing that Bowstreet does is to empower the "line of business" people. One of the benefits of a directory is to delegate administration to let line of business people change and access information. The IT group builds the Web services directory and they build a template, and then a line of business person can create the content.

We found that a lot of the IT folks don't want to be on the front line of administration. What's going on at a lot of places -- it's equivalent to calling the AT&T guy to come over to help you make a phone call -- it's a rudimentary example but it's really true.

ADVISOR: What's next for Bowstreet?

SERFASS: The next big thing for Web services and for Bowstreet all has to do with emergence of Web service marketplaces. This relates to digital marketplaces, but it's broader. We see Web services as the fourth wave of computing [after client-server computing]. There's no way that the Internet can change everything if companies do things the same way [for every business partner, supplier, and customer]. This requires a new computing model.

We're having an event in March [2000] in San Francisco to discuss the Web services revolution. Right now the industry is ahead of the vendors on this issue.