Dell.com: XML Case Study and Web Catalogue

There were at least two presentations that discussed Dell.com, one of the most successful eCommerce sites on the Web, which converted to XML in 1999. John Winfrey of Dell Computer spoke of "Data Transport and Management Using XML", which focused on the US Dell Web sites.

Winfrey presented some amazing figures. Mainstream companies presently spend an average of $1.6 million per year on their Web sites, competitive companies spend $4.9 million, and market defining companies spend $15 million. The Fortune 500 companies spent $1 billion on sites in 1999, representing only 9% of companies in 1999. This will be 25% by 2001.

Dell.com is a huge site to maintain, having 20,000 pages in its Services section alone. However, the site is key to Dell's success since it nets Dell $35 million per day in online sales, which now represents 43% of all sales (their goal is 50%). The problem that XML was selected to solve is one of duplication of content across major sections of the Web site, such as Home and Office. Much of the product information is very similar for certain configurations but may have slightly different options. Prices change on the average of three times a week at Dell, so it was tedious to make the necessary page changes using an HTML-only approach. Moreover, Dell's redesign needed to take into account what they call customer-ization, the ultimate in customization because it includes the exact product owned by the customer as well as locale factors (such as language). Winfrey spoke of ePub, the term Dell uses for the set of tools, Web server, plus application for the management and delivery of content. He displayed an architectural diagram that I wish was online so I could direct you to it.

Dell.com was relaunched November 7th in 80 countries with 22 different languages. The site uses Active Server Pages, Microsoft's IIS, Commerce Server, and webMethods' b2b Integration server. Cookies are stored with precise information about the customers' purchased products so that they can be automatically directed to the pages most relevant to them.

The second presentation related to Dell.com was "XML in Next-Generation Web Catalogs: A Real-World Case" by Larry Alston, eXcelon Division, Object Design, Inc. This talk centered on Dell EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), a group that also used XML but used a different approach than their US counterparts. Dell EMEA brings in $3.5 million per day from online sales. Alston talked about c-commerce (collaborative commerce) of 2000 that will go beyond the value/supply chain of the 1990's. This involves a loose coupling with lots of business partners. A rich and personalized selling experience is also important. XML is seen as the business process hub of c-commerce; XML enables b2b (business-to-business) integration.

For Dell, again the need was separation of content from presentation as well as support for multiple language. Object Design's eXcelon was used in creating the prototype in 2 months. eXcelon is an XML application development environment for integrating data. According to Alston, eXcelon is a fast, generic XML engine, with extensible access to databases, easy to setup, easy to add new products, and due to adherence to standards, the solution is futureproof. Server side transformations of XML using XSL and eXcelon in conjunction with Microsoft's XML parser and XSL processor delivered HTML. DOM is the native format used by eXcelon, which also provides XQL (XML Query Language, far from a W3C standard at this time). There is tight integration with Microsoft's IIS but there is only a COM client (although a Java client is expected shortly). As described on the Object Design Web site:

eXcelon is extremely well suited for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) systems. As an EAI data hub, eXcelon provides a single, unified view of any type of enterprise data, which you can query, update, delete, etc. .... eXcelon provides the scalability required for large-scale EAI projects. eXcelon's role in eBusiness applications is to facilitate the use of data. It supports a single, logical view of all data that can be efficiently accessed, extended and queried.

The object oriented data model defined a Product Specification base class with Language subclasses and Specific Configuration subclasses. Scripts and XSL were used to traverse the hierarchy to do the rendering. Specifications consisted on an unlimited number of name/value pairs that was completely extensible. For example:

<specifications>
    <specification name="processor">
        <value>Pentium III</value>
    </specification>
    <specification name="cache memory">
        <value>512</value>
    </specification>
	<!-- etc. -->	
</specifications>

For details on the Dell EMEA approach, see Chapter 29, Content Management with XML, A Dell Case Study, from the Sybex book, Mastering XML.

Alston also discussed a NEC use of eXcelon involving the Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) standard procurement process. See the Web eCommerce demo from NEC. More of the advantages and architecture are discussed on the Object Design Solutions pages.

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