The E-content Company, a division of Waltham, Massachusetts-based electronic publishing and documentation software house Interleaf Inc, has announced a scalable version of its BladeRunner XML content server.
Until now, explained Jeremy Sindall, VP of the companyÆs European operations, BladeRunner has managed content at the fragment level, which has meant considerable overhead and thus limited its scalability. Now, however, there is a bolt-on to the end of the product system to mirror only the essential parts for a scalable web site, he said. The scalable version of the server will be shipping in January.
Sindall described BladeRunner as an end-to-end system for generating XML out of Word and other word processing packages and store them in a specially designed repository. The generated code is then styled dynamically to a variety of devices (WAP phones, the Palm 7, pagers and digital TV, for example) using Extensible Styling Language, or XSL. The specificity of the repository is, he went on, that it can handle the granularity required by XML, making it to necessary to create a cross between an object and a relational database, he explained.
BladeRunner is targeted at the enterprise market of companies building e-business applications with a high content requirement. Microsoft Corp is using it to build a repository of all its training routines, while research group IDC is putting all its market research on a BladeRunner repository so as to build personalized reports for its customers.
In this context, the recent bundling of Net Perceptions’ profiling engine with the server was a key step, enabling the Microsoft application to select only the training program required by the specific user, while IDGÆs can pick out the customerÆs areas of interest. Sindall said other such partnerships can be expected, particularly with CRM vendors and developers of e-commerce software.
The e-content company is presently a division of Interleaf, but given its rate of development, there are plans for the parent to be rolled into the child, changing the corporate identity of the overall organization. This move can reasonably be expected to happen within the next six months, according to sources close to the Nasdaq-quoted company.
