One of the things that Cisco does best is to see a threat looming on the horizon and then take steps to mitigate the potential impact of that threat by acquiring new technology.
The acquisition of Reactivity is no exception as Cisco starts to comprehend the potential impact that service-oriented architectures based largely on XML are going to have on the network.
SOA and XML are both overnight revolutions in the enterprise that have been 10 years in the making. But as the adoption of these technologies continues to rise, the stress they put on the network is starting to be felt across the enterprise. XML in particular is a network killer because not only is it verbose, but Web services built using XML are very latency-sensitive, so any delay on the network can have an adverse impact on an application that is dependent on a Web service being executed in a timely manner.
The fact of the matter is that most networks today are based on router and switching equipment that is typically anywhere from three to five years old. To compensate for that, there's been a rising tide of interest in application acceleration devices to help prioritize certain types of traffic. Unfortunately, most of the existing application acceleration devices on the market today are not really optimized specifically for SOA-based applications.
Seen in that light, Cisco's move to acquire Reactivity is a pretty smart move given where we are as an industry in terms of the adoption of SOA. The only questions that remain are how quickly will Cisco rivals move to acquire Reactivity rivals such as Layer7 Technologies and what, if anything, will IBM do with Data Power, which it acquired in 2005.
In the meantime, there's a lot of activity in the networking arena when it comes to upgrading network infrastructure given the amount of time that has gone by since most IT organizations last purchased new routers and switches. The only thing that remains unclear at this point is whether those networks are being optimized for the wrong types of applications given the pending rise of SOA-based applications that put more stress and load on networks today than anything currently being experienced in the wake of data center consolidations that are already stressing networks to the breaking point.