More Information For Software Vendors

Steam XML and Water Provide Software Vendors With Advanced Web Services Capabilities

Water and Steam XML provide a powerful new way for software vendors to reduce cost while adding Web services capabilities, XML and user level customization to their products.

If your customers are asking you for:

• New custom features
• Web services and XML capabilities
• Reduced integration and interoperability costs

Then, like most software providers, you are evaluating options for responding while minimizing costs. These costs can appear in several forms as explained in the following paragraphs.

Sales & Support Costs

Your prospect's unique requirements can range from needing special functionality to requiring integration within their environment. Responding often means modifying products during the sales process to help close sales. This can increase your cost of sales and delay your revenue. Similar post-sales product tailoring increases your support cost.

Configuration Proliferation Costs

Each time you tailor a product for a customer, you create a unique product version, one different from your currently supported product releases. As tailored versions multiply, the unique features of each must be supported, tracked and managed. This adds to your costs.

Complexity Costs

Today's software products rely upon an underlying complex array of languages, APIs and protocols. This increases your development complexity and cost. Individual underlying components change frequently and independently from one another. Each change precipitates changes to your product, increasing your product maintenance costs. Adding Web services and XML capabilities, exacerbates the problem by introducing a new set of standards compliance issues and a new set of corresponding languages, APIs and protocols.

You can reduce complexity costs by minimizing exposure to underlying complexity and volatility.

You can reduce sales, support and configuration proliferation cost if you develop user level customization features.

One way to minimize these recurring costs is to enable your customers to easily tailor your products themselves. This often requires development of a custom language that allows them to:

• Create or change business rules (logic)
• Define or modify objects (data)
• Format results (presentation)

If any of the following seem familiar, then you are already on the path to language development:

• Using other languages or tools to make XML dynamic (e.g. XSLT, Xquery, Scheme, RDF, DAML)
• Supporting XML standards to address workflow or business process (e.g. BPXML, ebXML, SAML)
• Creating your own HTML template language
• Using or developing a parser
• Evaluating a scripting language to embed in your product
• Using or extending VB, JavaScript or a similar language to manage XML and Web services

But, language development is costly and risky.

Clear Methods allows you to eliminate the cost and risk of language development and insulates you from complexity and change. We offer the Steam XML IDE and Steam Engine, the only commercial development environment and runtime for the Water programming language. Water is the only programming language that allows developers to produce applications combining logic, data and presentation natively in XML.

Combining logic, data and presentation simplifies your customer's ability to customize your software products. Doing so natively in XML makes integration easier both within your customer's environment and across corporate boundaries through Web services. Water and Steam XML's features allow you to add Web services, XML and user customization to your products while improving your bottom line.

Features and Benefits of Steam XML and Water