COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Cisco Systems Inc.’s long-awaited response to Extensible Markup Language (XML) acceleration products was unveiled Tuesday (June 21) during a company event in Las Vegas.
The intelligent message-handling card for Cisco’s ISR and 2600 branch-office routers and Catalyst 6500 switches is tightly focused on message-passing acceleration for corporate applications like Tibco and Financial Information Exchange (FIX) — so much so that the product appears to be a direct response to new message routers unveiled by Canadian startup Solace Systems Inc.
The laser focus of the first product from Cisco’s Application Oriented Networking (AON) initiative was a surprise to designers of more broad-based XML acceleration tools, including DataPower Technology and Sarvega Inc.
DataPower Chairman Eugene Kuznetsov said his company has found value in moving closer to the data center, offering its hardware in IBM BladeCenter formats as well as standalone systems. But Kuznetsov said “message acceleration is interesting as a first pass, but at this point, it doesn’t seem as though Cisco’s or Solace’s entry into the market will fundamentally change application acceleration.”
Taf Anthias, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s AON business unit, said it would be jarring for many corporate customers to expect an immediate shift to Web services languages like XML and Simple Object Access Protocol. Instead, message accelerators must work with native FIX, SAP and Tibco messages. Offering full XML and SOAP capabilities will work with AON as the standards are adopted, he said.
“At the end of the day, the application network must speak the language the applications speak,” Anthias said. Cisco developed modules internally that use custom silicon for deep packet inspection and message acceleration.
Cisco collaborated with Acctional on information correlation and mapping, with CXO Systems Inc. on “dashboards” for information display, ConnectTerra on RFID extensions, VeriSign on public-key infrastructure tools and with TransactTools on transaction monitoring.
Partners on messaging protocols included IBM, SAP, Contivo, EDS, Tibco Software Inc. and ManTech International Corp.
Peter Ashton, Solace’s vice president of product management and marketing, called Cisco’s entry a validation of Solace’s approach. While start-ups must strive to compete with a market giant, Ashton said Solace is gaining traction in “publish/subscribe” XML markets such as financial and news services. As a result, he said Solace will remain a viable competitor to Cisco.
