Cisco seeks to control your apps

SAN JOSE - Cisco wants a central role in your service-oriented architecture plans, and is proceeding in that direction, whether its partners like it or not.

Cisco last week used its World Wide Analyst Conference to cast itself as a services and applications vendor, unveiling a broad strategy for tying all its enterprise technology into a services model. To that end, Cisco is expected this week to announce a set of software tools aimed at letting customers monitor and measure application performance on a network - a far leap from its history of selling hardware and pushing packets.

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The new products, and the company's Services Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) plan, promise to reduce corporate costs and move customers toward virtualized services, including security, voice, mobility, applications, management, processing and storage - with the network as the common facet.

Some observers say Cisco's moves put it on a collision course with most of its key application-related partners: IBM, Microsoft, HP and CA. Analysts say this type of toe-stepping and outright clashing is one of the biggest challenges for Cisco as it asserts its role in applications and SOA beyond its perceived image as a provider of network pipes.

In a series of presentations from Cisco execs last week, the company continued its mantra of 2005, that the network is the strategic center for where IT intelligence should reside in enterprises.

"The network will evolve into the platform" on which enterprises will build IT intelligence and application services, Cisco CEO John Chambers told a group of 400 financial and industry analysts. He emphasized the growing SOA approaches companies are planning as the key driver for Cisco. "It's the first time in history that technology advances are determining the future business strategies of companies."

To that end, Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer, identified Application Network Services (ANS) as Cisco's next Advanced Technology - or potential $1 billion annual revenue stream. ANS wraps all of Cisco's application-focused technologies under one umbrella - Layer 4-7 switching, WAN optimization, application acceleration and its Application Oriented Networking (AON) technologies around XML and SOA.

In a broader sense, ANS will be part of Cisco's amorphous SONA strategy. SONA will encompass all of Cisco's enterprise technologies - wired network infrastructure, voice, applications, security and mobility. Giancarlo said the SONA initiative will be on the level of past major Cisco initiatives, such as Cisco Blue - where IBM and Cisco network technologies were blended - and the company's late 1990s AVVID push for voice, video and data convergence.

"It's one of the first real restructurings of the way computers operate in the past several decades," he said.

The idea behind SONA is to pool servers, storage, processing and applications, with the network layer acting as an intelligence fabric tying everything together.

With this, IT "becomes just a bunch of processors and disks," tied together with intelligent network gear. Hardware and services virtualization will rely heavily on Cisco's new data-center and storage technologies, such as its TopSpin-based InfiniBand gear, as well as its AON technologies that accelerate XML and Web services traffic. The promise is that customers moving to SOA can save money and complexity by moving parts of SOA technology into the network - such as some tasks done by middleware and other server-based applications.