Cisco buys Reactivity for complementary firewall support

To beef up its application-oriented networking (AON) strategy, Cisco Systems recently acquired firewall technology vendor Reactivity for $135 million.

Reactivity's products are stand-alone appliances that parse and inspect incoming XML Web services messages. As such, Reactivity's products complement Cisco's, which act at the IP packet—or network communications—level. By contrast, XML messages used for Web services contain higher-level natural language information about a service request or service definition that humans can read.

Although the companies never really competed, when Cisco announced AON a year ago, as well as partnerships with vendors such as SAP, the potential for a rivalry was more evident.

Both Cisco and Reactivity aim to protect or enforce policies at the perimeter-covering application, rather than network-level processes. But Cisco's IP-based approach was far less efficient than Reactivity's.

With the Reactivity acquisition, Cisco gains a potential shortcut to delivering AON. And the buy also complements Cisco's earlier purchase of Fineground Networks, a provider of XML acceleration technology.

The Cisco/Reactivity deal—along with IBM's buy a year ago of XML firewall rival DataPower, and Intel's purchase of Sarvega—leaves only Layer 7 Technologies and Forum Systems as the remaining independents in the XML firewall market.

For now, Cisco will continue selling the Reactivity products separately, having not yet stated whether it will converge the products.