First Look

SOAs, ESBs, Web Services are proliferating -- along with high-volume XML-based data streams that have to be translated into and from a system's native format.

"The SOA world is driving for more common message formats, which is what XML gives us," Coral8 CEO Terry Cunningham notes. But he also noted how translating bigger, more complex and often nested XML messages between native formats adds considerable processing time.

"A lot of our customers in the major categories of financial services and sytems management and e-commerce are dealing with milliseconds, and any extra processing is unacceptable," Cunningham said.

In response, Coral8's latest version of its CEP engine avoids translation overhead. "We don't do the translations, we run the process in native XML. That's where if you run benchmarks, it runs much faster."

Cunningham feels eliminating the added cost of processing XML will become an important differentiator and because a wide variety of customers with heterogeneous streams of data showing up as XML are weighing in to back native XML support.

"ERP, supply chain and RFID systems are looking for more generic ways to handle messaging environments -- and for them, that's XML," he said. "And that will make our developers' lives a lot easier," he noted.