Forum Systems, which develops tools to speed the delivery of XML messages, this week is scheduled to upgrade its technology to provide end users with the ability to support new and traditional message-queuing protocols.

The support is available in Sentry Web Services Security Gateway 4.1, which Forum says provides the ability to blend traditional message queuing with Web services. The vendor also is adding support for identity-based access control not only at the XML message level but also for end users through integration with Web access management software from Netegrity, Oblix, RSA Security and Tivoli.

Also new are content-based routing and service-virtualization features, along with support for the attachments extension to the Simple Object Access Protocol and for WS-Security.

Most important, however, is the support for messaging queuing. It starts to move Sentry - which is available as software, a dedicated appliance or embedded on a PCI-card, - from pure traffic acceleration to a hub for process workflow.

"Forum Systems sees that if you are an appliance, and traffic is going through your box, and you are essentially looking at every message, then the question of 'should I route it?' can be made at the same time," says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink.

Schmelzer says that for companies deploying enterprise service bus technology - a sort of next-generation middleware that combines standards-based transactional messaging - XML transformation and rules-based routing, the question is, would it be more efficient to do that in hardware.

"I think we can start to see more hardware appliances getting into the game of doing things that fundamentally used to be done in software, such as message queuing, [QoS], guaranteed reliability and even transactions," Schmelzer says.

Earlier this year, Sarvega unveiled its Context Router, an appliance that works at Layer 7, and companies such as Digital Evolution, with its Service Manager, include routing features in software that installs on standard servers.

Forum Sentry 4.1 supports asynchronous messaging through integration with Tibco Rendezvous, JMS, IBM WebSphere MQ and emerging Web services protocols such as WS-Addressing, WS-Eventing and WS-Notification.

"The first thing for us is to support traditional message queuing from a transport perspective," says Walid Negm, vice president of product marketing for Forum Systems, adding that the company supports those over a service-oriented architecture.