I suspect that Google Protocol Buffers, Thrift, etc. are sufficient workarounds for anyone who has a current need for one of these things. If you are using XML as your payload and worried about shaving off milliseconds of latency, then you've done the wrong thing. Perhaps large IT organizations are forced to suffer the consequences of vendor-provided interoperability schemes and buy products like this to make the best of a bad situation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPower
I suspect that Google Protocol Buffers, Thrift, etc. are sufficient workarounds for anyone who has a current need for one of these things. If you are using XML as your payload and worried about shaving off milliseconds of latency, then you've done the wrong thing. Perhaps large IT organizations are forced to suffer the consequences of vendor-provided interoperability schemes and buy products like this to make the best of a bad situation.