Cisco reshapes InterWorks division

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - Cisco is reinventing its InterWorks Business Unit (IBU) because the company believes there are plenty of quality products already in the SNA-to-IP market.

The router giant formed the unit about five years ago to offer SNA-to-IP connectivity products, pitting it squarely against IBM's Networking Hardware Division (NHD).

Now executives say the division will stop inventing new tools for the legacy SNA market but will continue upgrading the ones it has. And what will the IBU's engineers work on with all the extra time? They'll help out the rest of Cisco.

One analyst agrees that Cisco's SNA job is largely done. "IBU shouldn't even be in existence," says Frank Dzubeck, principal at Communications Network Architects, a Washington, D.C. consultancy. The division has succeeded in putting out a complete offering of SNA-IP connectivity products and could now vanish inside the parent company, as was originally intended, he says.

Indeed, Dzubeck says, Cisco is just now publicly acknowledging what has long been going on.

Over the past year, teams of IBU's engineers have moved from legacy products to work on projects for other parts of the company.

For instance, the division's engineers are trying to add quality-of-service (QoS) features to packet switching devices for voice, video and data traffic, says Selby Wellman, general manager of the IBU, which is now called InterWorks Business Division.

Some engineers are working on custom chips that will boost the performance of devices made by other Cisco divisions; others are working on network management and WAN switching products.

The SNA background could help the effort to bring QoS to voice packets, says Randall Campbell, product line manager at Cisco.

Campbell says the division's engineers are looking at SNA techniques, such as custom queuing, prioritization and bandwidth reservation, as well as how to run data on lower speed lines for voice traffic.

The division's SNA engineers have an edge in the voice market, Dzubeck says. SNA and voice technology have a common requirement in that their sessions demand unbroken end-to-end connectivity.

Victim of its own success?

Cisco owns about 80% of the market for routers in SNA networks, Wellman claims, which translates to about $1.7 billion.

Armed with 1,000 employees and boasting a growing campus - four buildings with three more on the way - in techno-heavy Research Triangle Park, the unit may indeed have the muscle to back up its mandate.

The engineers who crafted the IBU's token-ring switching and other legacy products will give the company the edge in other markets, Cisco hopes.

There are two product areas in the SNA legacy market where Cisco hasn't been strong: SNA host and client software. And those are market segments in which other vendors are dominant.

Cisco would rather push into new ground.

But all this doesn't mean Cisco is pulling away from the SNA-to-IP convergence market - worth $4 billion to $10 billion, Wellman says.

He lays claim to a strong technological lineup.

"We've built up one of the top engineering teams in the company," Wellman says, citing its work on hardware and software and on various technologies, such as the InterWorks Operating System, QoS and custom Application Specific Integrated Circuits. o