The Application Delivery Network blog provides some insightful commentary on the "XML Delivery Network" market:
The XML-focused infrastructure market has been eerily quiet since Cisco’s acquisition of Reactivity, with only Vordel and Layer 7 making aggressive - and progressive - moves to continue updating and improving their products. Forum Systems is struggling and, by all accounts, losing many of the key personnel that have driven the company since its inception. Data Power and Reactivity appear to be suffering from “monolithic acquisition syndrome”, a long-suffering disease that drags down innovation and evolution of an emerging product once acquired by a large and well-established vendor in an adjacent market. Only time well tell if these two once would-be-contenders for the throne of the XDN market will re-emerge victorious. Historical evidence says Reactivity may well go the route of ArrowPoint within Cisco, and Data Power already appears to be on a Sun-like decline toward proprietariness.
That really leaves Vordel and Layer 7 to fight it out for king of the XDN, unless ADN vendors F5 or Citrix can make the moves necessary to get in the ring. Citrix’s recent acquisition of QuickTree indicates that it is certainly aware of the need to support XML, though its track record for integration says we may need to wait a while before we see anything definitive in this area.
[ From http://www.theapplicationdeliverynetwork.com/?p=86 ]
"XML Delivery Network" is a useful term. One of the founding principles of Vordel is that applications would be moving to using XML to serialize data on the network, so that means that "XML Delivery Network" is an asymptote to "Application Delivery Network". By making products which make it easier and faster to deliver XML on the network, removing the heavy-lifting off the app server and by lifting policy up into the hands of operations staff and out of the hands of developers, we could help our customers ride the XML wave. But, as XML becomes ubiquitous, there is less need to say "XML-based applications" as it's like saying "Electricity-based kitchen appliances".
9:45:24 AM 
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