Like Microsoft, Sun's offering is intended to attract companies that want to provide XML-based data services. But Microsoft and Sun have plenty of competition in this emerging market. All of the leading tech vendors, including IBM, Oracle, Sun and BEA Systems, are pushing their own technologies for individuals and companies interested in writing and running web services. If there is one company that will benefit no matter what, it is Cisco Systems, because one characteristic of XML is data expansion. Putting data in XML format and including the metadata description inevitably makes data bigger because we are shipping over the line not just the raw data, but also a description of the data.
Bigger data slows down the Internet.
A slower Internet makes network service providers build bigger network connections. And newer, bigger network connections always means more work for Cisco.