And unlike an ESB, [XML appliances] don’t sit in the middle of your network, which makes them a good fit for handling some of the same tasks at the edge of your network. As Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink says in the article: “Acceleration is certainly a huge part of the value, But if we’re looking at the XML message, we can do other things. We can enforce security; we can do management, routing or transformation; we can do queuing, failover and load balancing.”

Read more at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/lawson/xml-appliances-get-new-mission-integrating-b2b-and-the-cloud/?cs=40181