DataPower had been a pioneer in the gateway appliance market and IBM snatched up the company in 2005. Now the boxes play a leading role in Big Blue's SOA strategy.

The latest version of the DataPower security gateway, released in the Summer of 2007, scored high with judges for ease of use, manageability and service/support.

"These boxes work," wrote one judge. "In fact they work so well that people sometimes think they sound too good to be true. They aren't. Security doesn't have to be a problem, thanks in large part to gateway appliances."

The DataPower appliance offers centralized policy management and broad standards support, in LDAP, SAML and WS-Security. It provides firewall functionality to fend off additional threats including denial of service attacks.

The product features access controls that help ensure that only the right individuals have access to information. Field level message security shares information through encryption/decryption and signing/verification of entire messages or individual XML fields. It also interrogates every individual SOAP/XML transaction and determines whether it should be allowed based on payload contents, security policy and identity information.

It transparently maps a rich set of services to protect back-end resources with wire-speed performance, with the ability to process and validate messages at a central point in real-time so only known good requests reach valued back-end resources. High speed message signing and verification prevents falsified requests and securely logs transactions.

Product pricing starts at $65,000 and is contingent upon license and users.