The Cisco ACE XML Gateway is a key component of the Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) family of products. It brings application intelligence into the network and enables efficient deployment of secure, reliable, and accelerated Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications and Web services. These state-of-the-art features now enable the intelligent network to support service-oriented architecture (SOA) implemented using Web services technologies and to accelerate, secure, and scale XML applications.As the common, standards-based, framework for exposing business resources, XML applications and Web services simplify information accessibility and integration but with the cost of computationally intensive XML processing and the potential introduction of threats and vulnerabilities.By allowing autoprovisioning of Web services from Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry and application servers, and by providing transport and message-level security for XML -based network traffic, the Cisco ACE XML Gateway greatly facilitates secure deployment of XML applications and Web services. By offloading nonbusiness, computationally intensive operations directly to the network infrastructure, Cisco ACE XML Gateway enables a shared-service environment, reduces end-to-end latency, and enables business services to scale to meet capacity imperatives while improving server utilization.XML-based services require outstanding throughput to support today's complex integrated application systems. The Cisco ACE XML Gateway delivers industry-leading performance exceeding 30,000 transactions per second (TPS). All-in-memory processing and store-and-forward processing modes help ensure that XML messages of all sizes can be processed without compromising security, interoperability, or system reliability. The result is exceptionally secure, efficient, and flexible XML message processing performance, end to end. The dramatic performance improvements afforded by the Cisco appliance helps eliminate the barriers to deployment of Web services.