Forum Systems announced today the Forum Vantage XML Accelerator, a new product designed to provide XML acceleration across networks for secure and optimized delivery of Web services.

As enterprises continue to leverage the business benefits of SOA, demand has increased for appliances that operate in the data center to consolidate the processing of MXL messages that can significantly slow down ordinary processors and application servers, according to the company. Forum Vantage XML Accelerator offers a simplified deployment approach to help enterprises streamline configuration, maintenance, and security of application-oriented networks (AON). The appliance leverages a 64-bit platform architecture to accelerate XML/SOAP parsing, XML schema validation, XPath processing, and XSLT transformation functions.

Forum Vantage XML Accelerator complements Forum's existing XWall Web Services Firewall and Sentry SOA Gateway products, according to Walid Negm, vice president of marketing for Forum Systems. "You need to buy security, but the issue remains: are you fast enough?" said Negm, who said the standalone XML acceleration appliance fits into the deployment needs of enterprises where the XML firewall sits at the edge, the SOA gateway closer to the application, and a shared acceleration device in the data center. By enabling greater than 10,000 XML messages a second, and streaming very large multi-gigabyte files, the Forum Vantage XML Accelerator is more than 200 times faster than traditional software-based approaches to XML, according to the company.

The product is available immediately with a starting price of $45,000.