Redline Networks recently announced a partnership with DataPower Technology to bring their products together, offering a single product to allow Web-enabled enterprise data centers to provide faster, more secure and more efficient Web services, the companies say.
 
Over the next few years, proponents say Web services technology will evolve to the point that the loosely coupled applications won’t be all that interesting - they will just “be.” Today, though, technology to build better Web services is on everyone’s agenda.

During a panel session last week at Comdex, vendor executives discussed how Web services technology would evolve to become transparent to its users, much like HTTP is today. “At some point, Web services will fundamentally become plumbing,” Microsoft’s John Montgomery said.

Until then, enterprise companies such as Amazon.com can use tools from a variety of vendors or open source resources to build their service-oriented architectures to support Web services, said the online retailer’s Web services evangelist, Jeff Barr.

“We decided early on that Web services was not a science project; it was good business,” Barr told the Comdex audience.

Redline makes network appliances for improving the performance, flexibility and scalability of Web-enabled enterprise data centers. DataPower provides enterprises with XML-aware network infrastructure to help the performance, security and manageability of next-generation applications and Web services.

DataPower's and Redline's products are network devices that work by offloading processor-intensive tasks from general-purpose servers using high-speed processing technologies. Redline's E|X and T|X appliances handle data compression, load balancing, SSL processing and content processing of HTTP traffic; DataPower's XA35 and XS40 devices perform message-level SOAP security, Web services access control, XML routing and wire-speed XML transformations.

The combined Redline-DataPower product will target two types of environments: the new data center environment and the external XML Web services environment. In the new data center, the goal is to improve the speed, security and user accessibility of internal Web-enabled, business-critical applications. In external XML Web services environments, the concerns are ensuring security against outsider attacks, providing access control and improving the end-user experience.
 
DataPower and Redline recently completed interoperability tests on their respective products and have inked a co-marketing agreement, which includes joint promotional activities, bundle discounts and cross-selling programs.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.