Name: XML, born 10th February, 1998, at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Cambridge, MA.

XML has had a short life span if you compare it to its parent SGML, a publishing standard born decades earlier. However, what it lacks in age, it has more than compensated in its dramatic “rise to fame.”

XML became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation in 1998 ensuring its status as a “standard”. Fast forward to four years later to 2002. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, says he’s “betting his company on XML”. IBM pours $5B in new investments into XML. XML-based Web Services standards such as SOAP emerge.

Fast forward again to today. Almost every major computing vendor on the planet not only supports XML, but also, in most cases, XML-based Web Services. In 2003, Gartner Research stated it succinctly: “For the first time, the risk of NOT investing in XML outweighs the risk of investment.”

The short, but remarkable life of XML and associated standards owes its success to a couple of key factors. First, XML exemplifies one of the fundamentals of computing: Keeping things simple. XML was designed to be “text-based” and “extensible”. Its associated standards were designed to enable systems to be able to exchange, process and interpret XML-based content in a predictably uniform fashion, independent of underlying hardware or software. The acceptance of this simplicity and standardization is such that some 80 percent of all platform vendors today support XML and XML-based Web service architectures1. Further, according to recent estimates by analyst firm ZapThink, XML traffic is expected to account for 25% of the LAN traffic by no later than 2006. Other analyst estimates put this number as high as 60% for the same timeframe.

A second key driver in XML’s growth is the adoption of Web Services, the increasingly widespread computing paradigm for the exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. The growth in XML traffic has major implications for enterprise infrastructures and creates major pain points; the most critical of these require specialized solutions related to XML Web Services Security and XML Processing.

Let us look at XML Web Services Security first. XML based Web Services are typically used for sensitive, business-to-business applications. The problem is security in this context is multi-faceted. Before giving web services based access to critical business information, several security concerns need to be addressed. Who is using the Web Service? Are they authorized to do so? Are there any access controls over the Web Services? How do you ensure that the request was not tampered with along the way? How do you insure data privacy at the message level in order to be compliant with regulations on privacy? Today’s security solutions such as firewalls are directed at network layer security. In contrast, web services require fine-grained message level security enforcement.

Web services communication typically happens over open network firewall ports designed for internet Internet traffic. The nature of XML Web Services enables it to penetrate these firewalls, thus placing an additional burden on the network. To ensure that no malicious data is sneaking into the organization’s network, XML traffic must be carefully validated and filtered. Solutions addressing this pain point have to be secure and easy to deploy – and they have to perform the security tasks fast. Today, there are dedicated network appliance solutions built with the necessary characteristics that make them highly effective long term solutions.

Next comes the problem of processing. With the growth of XML traffic and the number of XML dialects that each enterprise needs to manage, data center servers are burdened by the very high overhead associated with XML processing. A common requirement of XML based systems is the ability to convert one XML dialect to another. The standard that enables this translation is commonly known by its acronym, XSLT. XSLT has made data format transformation possible on a scale that was only achievable before by employing a large army of coders. This processing however, is extremely processor and memory intensive. Designers of large, mission-critical applications, necessarily sensitive to processing latencies, recognize with the magnitude of the problem – and that there is no easy solution.

By using specialized XML Acceleration appliances, XML processing can become a core network capability that applications can assume to be available as “smart plumbing”. As a result, the application designers can focus on addressing the business problems and not XML processing. As XML usage continues to expand into all vertical markets and every computing platform, the issues of security and processing will only increase and become more complex.

How are such XML related issues best solved? For a computing analogy, let us look at the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW). The Internet era led to the evolution of the network from a connectionless routing environment to a new category of networking products such as application layer switches, caches and accelerators. These devices are capable of handling large volumes of browser requests concurrently and closer to the network edge. This evolution has enabled the networks to provide scaleable infrastructure. Similarly, despite the very different nature of solutions required for XML, XML processing and security are becoming a component of the networking infrastructure – part of the core plumbing that overlaying applications can leverage. This projection is corroborated by the fact that, over the last 12-18 months, enterprises have begun using specialized XML appliances that are designed to protect and process XML efficiently.

In order to estimate the size of this market, it is relevant to consider the estimates for hardware sales related to XML Web Services. IDC has estimated the the market size for such XML networking equipment is more than $6B in 2007. Even taking a more conservative view, there is still huge market potential. Like every successful technology, XML is evolving in market phases. Still in the hype cycle in 2000, over the last three years, XML related technologies appear to have moved into the early majority phase. Today, enterprises are in the process of evolving their networks from being XML oblivious to XML smart. The next few years promise to be exciting from a network perspective as XML Web Services become virtually commonplace. XML networking has the potential take the network infrastructure through a major makeover – this time taking it closer to the applications by transparently processing, securing and routing XML! Stay tuned.

Girish Juneja is a co-founder and executive vice president of product marketing, Sarvega, Inc. Before co-founding Sarvega, he held various senior technology and management roles at Thomson Financial Services, Verizon and MCI. Juneja has an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and MBA from the University of Chicago.