The largest patent information company in the world sells patent data from dozens of countries via an online database, with BRS as its back end. It has used BRS for over decade, because it is fast, stable and scalable, even though it can be difficult to administer.

Problems :

1. More and more source data is in XML, and BRS does not support XML. Data have to be processed into a format BRS can use, and the markup is lost.

2. Some of the databases are in Asian languages, and BRS does not support Unicode; they have resorted to using relational databases for these datasets.

3. The databases are getting larger and more detailed, and BRS has trouble scaling to these sizes.

4. Having evolved over several decades, BRS's interfaces are rather complex and inflexible, and BRS is difficult to manage.

Solutions :

1. We provide native support for XML.

2. Our software is content-neutral; context ( e.g. character sets, numeric encoding) is handled through plug-ins.

3. Having been designed to take advantage of modern computer architecture, XPace scales much better than BRS.

4. Our API and our web framework are simple and flexible, and are based on modern standards.