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RESEARCH REVEALS NEW TRENDS IN XML-INTENSIVE DATA CENTERS

Conformative Systems, a pioneer in developing high-performance XML parallel-processing solutions, and RESolution Market Research announced the findings of a research project that was designed to understand the use of XML in medium and large companies and to examine the extent of XML performance issues. A key finding was that while significant momentum is building among a majority of the respondents to use XML-based applications, Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), few were prepared to respond to the inevitable performance issues inherent in an XML-intensive environment.

According to Allison Wilt, president of reSolution Market Research, "In this rapidly growing market, Web services (and XML) are viewed as a way to reduce complexity and provide scale -- quickly. But adopting these standards has led to increased processing demands on data center servers. Customers are just beginning to discover that XML parsing, validation or transformation can tie up a significant portion of processing capacity and could potentially result in quality of service problems."

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Additional research findings included:

• Over half of companies interviewed view XML as a strategic corporate- wide vision and are building new applications now and over the next six to 12 months -- many of which need to communicate with legacy applications and data sources.
• Respondents stated the benefits of using XML in terms of improving efficiency and lowering support costs. Specific examples included faster application development and deployment, greater application portability and easier staff hires.
• Among the companies that had experienced performance problems, parsing data, rendering of large documents and data transformations were the most often cited issues.
• Although large-scale XML projects are underway, few companies had a long-term strategy for dealing with the inevitable performance problems. The top answers for responding to performance issues were: add hardware, batch process some applications and tune databases.
• About two-thirds of respondents expressed interest in XML acceleration technology that was described to them, especially if it could easily integrate into the customer's existing environment.
• The key benefits to XML acceleration technology were seen as: solving current performance problems and providing a less expensive solution to rewriting code or reconfiguring hardware systems to handle higher loads.

Conformative Systems is developing the first and only parallel processing hardware platform for accelerating data intensive XML processing and facilitating web services. Conformative's solution delivers up to 50 times faster processing of XML data and enables corporate data centers to work at greater capacity to meet customer needs.

"As IT departments look to build highly flexible business systems and shorten application development time, they are adopting XML as their data-interchange standard of choice," said Mark Nagaitis, vice president of marketing for Conformative Systems. "Rather than expending a tremendous amount of time and resources trying to optimize the performance of their XML-based applications, or adding servers, respondents saw acceleration technology as a cost effective way to meet their critical need for high performance application processing."

"We hope that sharing the results of this research with the industry will help enterprises to prepare for the impending XML boom -- and painlessly achieve all of the benefits that SOA and XML offer," said John Derrick, CEO of Conformative Systems. "Enterprises should be able to seamlessly scale their XML-based architectures without the massive expense of significantly expanding their server-based processing capacity."