Cisco Systems Inc has beefed up its Application Oriented Networking (AON) offering by spending $135m on Reactivity Inc, a privately-held developer of XML inspection technology for purposes of security, enhancing performance and guaranteeing availability.

Belmont, California-based Reactivity has been in existence since 1998, with the core of its offering being its XML parsing engine, which underscores a range of security gateways for data centers, DMZs and the developer in the test lab. It also offers single-console management of all three with its Reactivity Manager. 

Meanwhile the San Jose, California-based networking giant threw its hat into the XML ring two years ago with the announcement of AON, an initiative to deliver app-aware networking based on moving messages intelligently around a network and establishing the right relationship between apps, prioritizing VoIP and business-critical apps over Web surfing and so on. The rationale for this, recalled George Kurian, VP and GM of its app delivery business unit, was that "we're seeing the need for network-smart infrastructure to complement the distributed application models of SOA and Web 2.0."

Not surprisingly, rivals claim that converging XML and IP parsing approaches is akin to mixing apples and oranges. "XML is a different animal from an IP packet," said Dimitri Sirota, vice president of marketing for Layer 7 Technologies Inc, one of Reactivity's rivals. For starters, he noted, IP doesn't have the kind of complex headers that you have on an XML envelope.

At the time, Reactivity went to the trouble of issuing a statement welcoming Cisco's entry as market validation, while at the same time arguing that it had a three-year lead that gave it important differentiators such as breadth of support for the 60-plus platforms out there supporting XML Web services. Sirota of Layer 7 indirectly concurred, noting that while his firm typically saw DataPower and Reactivity in head to head bakeoffs, he only saw Cisco three times. And Cisco didn't win any of the deals.

ComputerWire actually speculated that, rather than try and catch up, Cisco might choose to buy Reactivity or one of its competitors, so it's nice to be proven right. And paving the way for the eventual acquisition, the company went through a clean sweep of the executive suite that brought in several former Cisco principals about three months ago.

Of course, Cisco is not alone among industry heavyweights in snapping up XML minnows in preparation for the race to supply the necessary infrastructure for the world of Web services and Web 2.0. Indeed, it's been a veritable land grab, with IBM buying DataPower and Intel nabbing Sarvega.

Kurian said that, beyond the XML security that Reactivity already provides on its gateways, the parsing engine will be applicable in accelerating XML traffic through latency mitigation and offloading XML processing, which presumably means Cisco will either develop its own ASICs to act as offload engines, or find a suitable supplier and buy them.

A larger question, of course, is whether XML firewall appliances really should remain a standalone, best of breed market. Since IBM acquired has kept its options open as to repackaging much of the logic as extensions to SOA governance or Tivoli's federated identity tools. As for Intel, it's kept fairly mum, but it would be reasonable to conclude that it hopes to build some of Sarvega's firmware into chipsets that would power other third party appliances.

The fact is that XML firewall security has a rough potential fit into several broader segments: IT infrastructure management, application management, or the less mature SOA governance area. So that places prospective suitors like CA, BM, and HP in play. You could argue that Layer 7 and Forum Systems, another XML security appliance, could plug some gaps.

The main hang-up, however, is the folks worrying about XML security tend to be from the software side, while the folks running IT infrastructure and security speak a different language. That's a gap that HP is trying to fill by blending the former Overview network node management business (yes, we know they manage other aspects of IT infrastructure) with its recent Mercury acquisition, and using Mercury's "Business Technology Optimization" branding.

Interestingly, Layer 7 already is one of HP/Mercury's Systinet Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) partners. So, if we were in the mood to predict another acquisition, this would be it.

Back to Reactivity, there are potential synergies in the Cisco deal as well, if you accept the notion that XML and IP management should be converged. When data in XML is traversing the wire, it uses the SOAP encapsulation protocol to run over HTTP, which Cisco can accelerate using the technology it acquired when it bought FineGround. Kurian acknowledged that the Reactivity technology would be suitable for "integration with our application acceleration platform."

Kurian would not be drawn, however, on whether the XML Operating System, or XOS, that underpins the existing appliances from Reactivity would stay as is, or the smarts from the acquired portfolio would be ported to Cisco's own IOS.

"We integrate acquired technologies in three ways," he began. "First we sell it as a standalone appliance, sometimes with some of our own Cisco technology. Then we put it on a blade to go into our switches or routers, and finally, we componentize it and bring it into IOS." He declined to speculate whether the Reactivity technology would go all the way through to the third phase, however.

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