Cisco bolsters SOA with Reactivity buy

“The AON platform movement hasn’t yet resulted in as much market traction as originally supposed,” says Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “It’s possible that this acquisition can give Cisco the kick in the pants it needs to effectively take advantage of a growing opportunity for management of XML and Web services traffic.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Cisco To Acquire XML Gateway Provider Reactivity

“Reactivity adds robust security and policy management capabilities to the Cisco platform where it was sorely lacking,” Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink, said in an email. Cisco’s application management platform hasn’t received the market traction as originally expected, so “it’s possible that this acquisition can give Cisco the kick in the pants it needs to effectively take advantage of a growing opportunity for management of XML and Web services traffic.”

Read more at: Cisco To Acquire XML Gateway Provider Reactivity

Cisco Fills XML Processing Gap With Reactivity

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said Reactivity would give Cisco robust security and policy management capabilities to the Cisco platform where it was sorely lacking.

“It seems that the AON platform movement hasn’t yet resulted in as much market traction as originally supposed, and so it’s possible that this acquisition can give Cisco the kick in the pants it needs to effectively take advantage of a growing opportunity for management of XML and Web services traffic,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InternetNews

Cisco’s Reactivity Buy Further Consolidates SOA

This latest acquisition is further evidence that the markets for XML, Web services, and SOA are experiencing significant consolidation, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “With IBM adding Datapower to their lineup, Intel adding both Sarvega and Conformative, and F5 Networks further maturing their offerings, the addition of Reactivity to Cisco’s offerings goes a long way to signaling that we’re in the era of incumbents increasingly dominating the space once pioneered by the startups,” Schmelzer said. “Of course, there are certainly outstanding startups like Layer 7 Technologies, Forum Systems, and companies like Xambala and Tarari still making waves in the market.”

Moreover, Reactivity adds robust security and policy management capabilities to the Cisco platform where it was “sorely lacking,” Schmelzer added. “Indeed, it seems that the AON [Cisco's Application-Oriented Networking technology] platform movement hasn’t yet resulted in as much market traction as originally supposed, and so it’s possible that this acquisition can give Cisco the kick in the pants it needs to effectively take advantage of a growing opportunity for management of XML and Web services traffic.”

Read more at: eWeek

Cisco Systems buys Reactivity in SOA networking play

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, said the acquisition may help SONA gain traction that has so far eluded it.

“Specifically, Reactivity adds robust security and policy management capabilities to the Cisco platform where it was sorely lacking,” Schmelzer said. “Indeed, it seems that the SONA platform movement hasn’t yet resulted in as much market traction as originally supposed, and so it’s possible that this acquisition can give Cisco the kick in the pants it needs to effectively take advantage of a growing opportunity for management of XML and Web Services traffic.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Tarari Silicon Accelerates Java XML Systems; Tarari Expands Reach of Fast XML Processing Technology to the Enterprise with Modern, Efficient API Optimized for Plug-In Hardware Acceleration

“DOM and SAX simply were not designed with today’s high-volume, transaction-intensive XML applications in mind, and the result is both programming and performance inefficiency,” said Ronald Schmelzer, analyst at research firm ZapThink. “Tarari’s RAX-J replaces this obsolete and inefficient method of parsing XML with an approach that promises to help improve performance, and thus ROI, of XML on the network. Combined with Tarari hardware acceleration, RAX-J enables developers to build end-to-end, standards-based XML applications with unprecedented performance.”

Read more at: Tarari Press Release

RAX-J: Radically Improving the Processing of XML Applications

XML is rapidly becoming the protocol and format of choice for interactions among disparate systems and organizations connected via networks. More than a text-based, metadata format for data interoperability, XML is now the answer to solving many of the long-standing issues with application and data integration as well as providing a lingua franca for developers to create application programming interfaces (APIs) that arbitrary systems can interact with.

Despite all the positive momentum that XML continues to garner in the enterprise, XML remains a highly inefficient and burdensome protocol to process. XML processing requires a dozen steps or more, including parsing, decryption, validation, and message transformation activities. This burdensome collection of tasks is increasingly bogging down systems with menial chores before they can even begin processing business logic. This paper aims to take the XML processing challenge one step further by suggesting that developers are the cause of many of the problems in their use of the increasingly obsolete DOM and SAX methods of XML parsing. Instead, this paper suggests a new approach to XML processing that improves upon the increasingly obsolete DOM and SAX methods of XML parsing: Random Access XML for Java, (RAX-J).

XML Threat Management

XML has become the lingua franca of distributed computing — the language at the heart of an increasing percentage of traffic on networks today. As companies implement Service-Oriented Architecture, they build Services, and at the core of the definition of a Service is software that communicates via the exchange of messages — typically in the form of XML. An increasing amount of other network traffic leverages XML, as well.

Any IT security effort must therefore plan for and deal with XML threats, partly because of the explosion in the use of XML, but also because XML’s power and flexibility lead to multiple threat categories, including structural threats like oversized and improperly structured XML messages, semantic threats that target the content of the XML message, and more. Companies must implement a comprehensive XML threat management solution that deals with all forms of XML threats, and that solution must operate at wire speed.

Tarari Introduces New XML Security Silicon

“By 2010, XML traffic will represent the majority of all system-to-system and business-to-business interactions, with the result that over 50 percent of all network traffic will be XML-based by then,” said ZapThink LLC analyst Ronald Schmelzer. “Such growth is predicated on the ability of vendors to deliver solutions that ensure this traffic is accurate and free of threats. Tarari XTM offers vendors an innovative silicon technology to enable this capability to augment their existing devices.”

Read more at: Tarari Press Release

Tarari to Ship First Multi-Core Content Processors

“With the maturity of Service-oriented Architecture (SOAs) and Web Services technologies, notoriously inefficient XML processing will soon consume more and more compute resources in every data center,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, LLC. “Tarari’s T9000 family of Content Processors provides developers with an important technology for creating XML-based security without imposing significant additional load on existing application servers and middleware infrastructures.”

Read more at: Tarari Press Release