Executive Summary

A vendor application uses XML to provide a selling benefit by reducing the cost of delivering existing product features or enabling new product features. As with enterprise applications, the best way to understand how to achieve such benefits at your company is to consider some examples. This consideration will provide both inspiration and context for using the technology. Other than XML infrastructure products, vendors do not use XML in isolation. Figuring out appropriate uses for XML in your products requires an understanding of how it operates with other product components .

Table 8-1 lists five examples of important vendor applications where XML can deliver significant selling benefits. The rest of this chapter discusses these applications in detail. The first three apply primarily to vendors of Internet services and concern XML benefits that make new service features possible and existing service features robust. The last two apply primarily to vendors of products and concern XML benefits that make certain software features easier to develop and more interoperable.

Table 8-1. Vendor Applications and XML Benefits

	Category	Examples	Key XML Benefit
Flexible Content Provisioning	Content Documents	Portals Online shopping	Portable user profile definition and flexible content customization
Information Aggregation	Business Documents	PC component information Schedule consolidation	Easy format translation and document assembly
Application Services	Protocol Documents	Outsourced payroll Outsourced HR	Easier to integrate best-of-breed offerings
Configuration and Logging	Protocol Documents	Component deployment Interaction logs	Compatibility of development and analysis tools
Distributed Protocols	Protocol Documents	Peer-to-peer computing SOAP	Faster development through access to standard formatting infrastructure