Capitalizing on the increased interest in safeguarding the delivery of Web
services,
out a new networking device that makes XML and non-XML data usable for
mainframes, enterprise service buses (ESBs)
integration.
The XI50 Integration Appliance supports a range of popular transport
protocols,
including IBM’s MQ Series, and can perform translations between formats
other than XML. XI50 can parse and transform arbitrary binary, flat text
and XML messages, including COBOL CopyBook,
DataPower makes these tasks possible with its own metadata
Because of the glut of transactions that banks and brokers need to process,
approach, a patent-pending technology called DataGlue, which employs Data
Oriented Programming (DOP) schemas without bottlenecks.
Eugene Kuznetsov, CTO for the Cambridge, Mass., company, said the machine is
another piece of the company’s application oriented networking (AON)
strategy for helping network gear evolve from its present packet-oriented
state to becoming driven by applications.
“It’s not just a matter of taking the same set of software products and
putting them on a server,” Kuznetsov told internetnews.com. “There’s
too much customization required with that approach. The XI50 behaves much
more like a network device or router than like a piece of software.”
At a higher level, this is consistent with what many programmers have been
trying to do in the industry in the last couple of years — offering
distribution of applications through service-oriented architectures (SOAs)
that DataPower is the first to succeed.
“A lot of this has to do with customer demand and uptake,” Kuznetsov said.
“People are buying into this notion of the application-oriented network and
being able to have data routing, transformation and security as a network
infrastructure service that’s shared between applications, rather than some
custom-coded Java approach.”
The XI50 maintains DataPower’s standard of security and access control.
Messages can be securely filtered, validated, encrypted and signed. The
appliance also supports security standards such as WS-Security and SAML
XI50
is already being used by major financial institutions, Kuznetsov said,
though he
declined to list specific customers.
Available now, the XI50 XML Integration Appliance costs from $50,000 to
$75,000, depending on configuration.
The X150 product is the latest in a slew of recent Web services security
products to hit the market, with DataPower rivals Reactivity and Oblix
making noise in the space of late. Last week, Reactivity launched
an integrated security system, while Oblix upgraded its
security software.
ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer said that while the Web services
security space has quite a few vendors contending for market share,
the sector is starting to see some differentiation. He said DataPower’s
differentiator is enabling high-performance security.
“While all the other vendors claim high performance, what makes DataPower
unique is that they have produced their own chipset that is focused on
specific XML and Web Services acceleration tasks,” Schmelzer told
internetnews.com. “As a result, one of their other differentiators is
their increasing focus on attracting resellers and OEMs to embed their
capabilities in other solutions. This is definitely a growing market
opportunity for most of the vendors in the space.”
But the biggest challenge for DataPower is not overcoming charges from
rivals — it’s dealing with an industry where there might not be enough
deals to go around. Going forward, the analysts said there will soon be a
“tipping point,” after which Web services implementations will become
ubiquitous, which could help make DataPower products more attractive.
