The military heavy customer list might be a result of Mr. Schneider's past job at a defense contractor. On the other hand, maybe XML is popular in military circles.

Hi Dare! Thanks for the shoutout! Much appreciated. I'm always hearing good things about your work up the hill in Redmond!

The customer list on our web-site does look a little unusual for a tech-startup. We funded some of our research and developments by winning government grants and the government had access to our products before the general public. Efficient XML caught on very quickly and before we knew it we had a whole bunch of defense customers, including the largest defense contractor in the U.S. ($40B annually) and the largest defense contractor in Europe ($22B annually). I've always said its a good idea to fund the company with customers that want your products rather than investor that want their money back! :-)

Indeed, the military makes very heavy use of XML covering many of the commercial use cases we all know and love -- with perhaps more emphasis on speed, reliability and security -- plus a few more "interesting" ones. There are a ton of SOAP & REST web services, AJAX applications, ESBs, Jabber clients, RSS feeds, web sites, etc. They also operate several global wireless networks connecting a variety of mobile devices, similar to commercial cell-phone carriers. Tapping into the commercial XML marketplace drastically reduces costs, increases interoperability and accelerates their tempo of evolution. We were careful to make Efficient XML as efficient as their best hand-optimized binary formats, so they can now use XML practically anywhere, from the high-speed message routers that feed real-time displays to airborne web services. They've been using the software for over two years now and have put it on aircraft, vehicles, satellite systems, high-speed routers, app servers, etc. Its been very cool to see!

Thanks again! Stop by and see us sometime!

You need to remove "This is the first in a series of weekly posts ..." from the header.