Cisco braces for a major focus change

Global networking company Cisco Systems announced yesterday the next phase of its Intelligent Information Network (IIN) initiative with the unveiling of Application Oriented Networking (AON).

The new AON technology integrates awareness of application-to-application messaging into the network fabric, enabling the network to speak the language of common business applications.

The company`s approach to AON is based on innovative new technology that moves beyond the packet level to read application-to-application messages flowing within the network - such as purchase orders, investment transactions or shipment approvals.

Cisco says its new range of AON products enables business applications and networks to work together as integrated systems. It announced AON modules for data centre switches and for branch office routers, which complement current Cisco packet and content-aware products by providing application message-level awareness of business applications.

According to Willie Oosthuysen, systems engineering manager for Cisco in Sub-Saharan Africa, AON is the next logical step in Cisco`s vision of the evolution of the intelligent network.

"In the past we built separate physical networks for voice, video and data, but thanks to convergence, all network traffic can now run on a single infrastructure over Internet protocol, and the different types of traffic can be managed by intelligent software," he says.

He adds that the next step is to enable virtualisation and provisioning of network resources on demand, so that bandwidth, CPU capacity and memory can be automatically allocated when and where they are needed.

"The third step is to provide applications with a network that is clever enough to provide the message translation services needed to communicate. The problem in the real world is that although the network may be homogeneous, there are many thousands of different interfaces that applications use to talk to each other. AON provides the network with the intelligence to enable applications to communicate seamlessly," explains Oosthuysen.

The AON approach is also based on collaborative efforts with industry leaders, such as IBM and SAP, which share Cisco`s vision for helping customers to better manage business applications and business processes through network-embedded solutions, he says.

"Two industry-leading companies, IBM and Cisco, are working together to help customers to become more flexible, to use their IT infrastructure in support of their business goals, helping them to become On-Demand businesses," says Robert LeBlanc, general manager, WebSphere, IBM Software Group. "IBM`s collaborative efforts with Cisco in support of AON will allow WebSphere and Cisco customers to capitalise on this emerging architecture to reduce complexity, consolidate IT and improve performance."

Oosthuysen points out that once data centres and networks gain dial-tone-style intelligence, AON will allow businesses to reinvent themselves overnight if required.

"Imagine reconfiguring an entire business process in your organisation simply by dragging and dropping icons to reflect the new layout. This is the promise of AON - that the network will take care of the necessary translation in the same way that IP phones today can automatically find the nearest server when plugged into a network. In the future, complex ERP installations that currently take millions of rand in resources to configure and years to install could take just a few minutes," he explains.

With the majority of hardware and solution vendors punting real-time computing environments using converged networks, Cisco saw the importance of adopting this three to five year strategy.

Oosthuysen says the first step of moving everything onto an IP-based network is nearing completion. The second phase, he says, is to "virtualise" the network and infrastructure by pooling resources, such as storage and security, so different applications can draw on whatever capacity they need at a specific time.

This will result in a drastic reduction in the company`s hardware investments and the administration required because the resource provisioning will be automated in future.

The third phase of the company`s new strategy, will be the virtualisation of the applications. Instead of implementing resource-intensive applications such as ERP packages by installing separate servers and configuring users and processes around them, users will be able to access them over the same network as they would any other applications.

The next phase will see total convergence where all functions will be embedded into the network, and one command will enable the entire network to be configured in line with any changes to the company`s business processes.

Essentially, the graphical user interface will become the dashboard for setting up a user`s environment. Oosthuysen says that in future making a call might simply mean dragging an e-mail received onto the telephone icon to automatically call the person.

The concept received a nod from Roy Blume, BMI-TechKnowledge (BMI-T) research manager, who labelled it compelling, radical, complex but innovative, yet warned that while the technology makes a good business case on paper, there still remains the challenge of ensuring its adoption.

BMI-T research director Mark Walker, speaking in his personal capacity, describes the decision to partner with Business Connexion (BCX) in the rollout of its Intelligent Information Network initiative as a "canny move by the networking giant".

"On the one hand Cisco has already got a well established relationship with Dimension Data. It is about as good as it can get. One the other hand BCX needs to bring more attention to itself."

Walker notes that while the BCX and DiData skills and client sets do overlap, there are also niche areas of differentiation, which could also account for the decision.

Commenting on Cisco`s decision to go up the value added chain, Walker says this is part of an overall trend in the IT industry.

"Ten years ago the value-added pressure was felt at the reseller end of the chain and the manufacturers were shielded from it. Companies such as Cisco could concentrate on box moving. However, now even the manufacturers have to go further up the value stack," he says.

According to overseas press commentary, a large chunk of Cisco`s equipment is manufactured in countries such as China and the factories there are now beginning to market their own branded products that are essentially far cheaper, while using the same technology.

"The change in strategy is not new internally for Cisco. They have realised for some time that they had to change their model," Walker says.