For those of you SOA trivia buffs who were wondering, just what was Intel actually going to do with its Sarvega acquisition of a couple years back, it’s finally providing the answer: Intel is getting back into the OEM software business. To recap, Sarvega was one of those XML appliance vendors that managed to execute superbly on its exit plan. More about that in a moment.

Instead of going into the x86 XML firewall business (which would dissuade anybody else from Intel processors), Intel dissembled the Sarvega technology, optimized it for x86 (of course), and refactored and updated it for today’s multicore architectures. And it’s planning to offer the technology on an OEM basis for middleware and ESB providers to embed it in their offerings.

The first step is happening this week as Intel announced the release candidate of its SOA Security Library, with the goal of general release by early summer. The goal is enabling the middleware to manage processes like encryption/decryption, digital signature processing, or content-based routing, taking advantage of virtualization to optimize the kinds of tasks that you formerly had to parcel out specially. In other words, gaining the advantages of appliances without having to specially dedicate some silicon, because an underutilized appliance can be just as wasteful as an overtaxed general-purpose server. For instance, if all of a sudden you are besieged by new users, why not provision a VMware or Xen container to handle it, rather than having to dedicate power and space in a data center.

It’s interesting to see what happened to the XML appliance market. It emerged because processing XML incredibly resource-intensive. Putting it all in appliances was a way of saying let’s just throw the problem over the wall. That’s fine when, for instance, your SOA environment has gotten just past pilot stage but is not yet widespread. At that point it makes sense to isolate processes such as digital signature processing. But once more business units sign on, you face the need to buy lots of special-purpose hardware that could sit idle much of the time.

Sarvega, like DataPower and Reactivity, were eventually acquired, leaving Layer 7 as the only remaining independent player; significantly Layer 7 has also ventured outside its box, and now offers its XML firewall and mediation processes as conventional software. Cisco has used Reactivity to enhance XML processing capabilities within its routers, while IBM has taken DataPower a different direction, and is gradually expanding the appliances to go beyond XML processing to areas like data transformation, message brokering, and BI to provide power boosts to key pieces of its WebSphere, Information Management, and Tivoli lines.

XML appliances, may they rest in peace.

---