XML Appliance - History of XML Appliances

History of XML Appliances

The first XML Appliances were created by DataPower and Vordel in 1999, Sarvega in 2000, Forum Systems in 2001 and Layer 7 Technologies in 2002. Early vendors like DataPower focused on the XML acceleration problem which they solved through specialized hardware. While several vendors like DataPower (purchased by IBM in 2005 ) and Layer 7 Technologies continue to offer hardware accelerated options for high performance situations, advances in computing speed has made software or vmware based "appliances" practical in many common customer situations. Early use cases for XML Appliances included banking and cross-agency government information sharing. Today XML Appliances are widely used across finance, telecommunications, government, energy, logistics commensurate with the growing usage of XML as a cross-division and cross-company data exchange protocol.

In 2005, XML Appliances (or SOA Appliances as they came to be known) became increasingly associated with Service Oriented Architectures and more specifically the problem of governing SOA. The governance of SOA comes down to the control of how applications delivered as "services" can be shared with or called by other applications. Appliances became a popular way of controlling or governing SOA because addressed message security, availability and translation of data so that an application can call another application irrespective of the data format and security policies. Governance of SOA became so critical that Gartner, a leading technology analyst firm, published a dedicated Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets Magic Quadrant on the topic that covered both SOA management and SOA appliances in March 2007 and most recently in March 2009.

In recent years as XML has become a common way to expose data and application functionality over the Internet XML appliances or gateways have become common place in many integration scenarios.