Cisco exec touts network management push

Cisco wants to become a bigger player in the network and application performance management technology realm. In December the company launched the Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) product suite, which offered customers traffic and packet analysis, bandwidth monitoring and application performance management products and services. Now Cisco is targeting network device configuration and change management. Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president of the Network Management Technology Group at Cisco,recently discussed how the vendor sees management technology helping customers evolve their networks to support advanced IP applications and network service with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie.[Click here for the audio version]

Update our readers on Cisco's progress with its management technology strategy and product launches.

When we started this, it was clear that this is not a 'come up with a couple of products and that will satisfy things' approach. As customers have been using the first suite of products, they were coming back, seeing the potential and saying, 'Couldn't you help me in this area?' Now they are asking for better diagnostics and visibility into some the latency issues that occur within their entire systems. They want to know how they can get a good way to track the complete flows of a transaction as it runs through an entire system. They are looking to us to take what we have done at a network level and interface it now to diagnostics and monitoring techniques that exist in other areas of their IT environment and help them diagnose more system level issues. They want things monitored at a system level. We've monitored for them at the network level. Now they want to go a step above from that and interface your tools with other system management tools.

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Cisco wants to become a bigger player in the network and application performance management technology realm. In December the company launched the Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) product suite, which offered customers traffic and packet analysis, bandwidth monitoring and application performance management products and services. Now Cisco is targeting network device configuration and change management. Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president of the Network Management Technology Group at Cisco,recently discussed how the vendor sees management technology helping customers evolve their networks to support advanced IP applications and network service with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie.[Click here for the audio version]

Update our readers on Cisco's progress with its management technology strategy and product launches.

When we started this, it was clear that this is not a 'come up with a couple of products and that will satisfy things' approach. As customers have been using the first suite of products, they were coming back, seeing the potential and saying, 'Couldn't you help me in this area?' Now they are asking for better diagnostics and visibility into some the latency issues that occur within their entire systems. They want to know how they can get a good way to track the complete flows of a transaction as it runs through an entire system. They are looking to us to take what we have done at a network level and interface it now to diagnostics and monitoring techniques that exist in other areas of their IT environment and help them diagnose more system level issues. They want things monitored at a system level. We've monitored for them at the network level. Now they want to go a step above from that and interface your tools with other system management tools.

How is Cisco's approach now different from how it has worked with customers to manage networks in the past?

The philosophical change is that this is a terrific set of capabilities that customers are deploying. The next step is to give them more control over it so they can set up business policies and tell the network how to behave. For instance, which applications, which users, what level of service do you want to guarantee. This moves up from performance management into systems assurance management. They are determining how to assure the network and systems they are running are delivering the results that they need and allows them to set up rules and policies ahead of time to dictate and direct the network how to act under certain constraint conditions.

This week's PACE [Proactive Automation of Change Execution] product suite is based on an OEM deal with Opsware. How does this type of partnership help Cisco?

The overall management arena is about a complete solution for our customers. We've said that we are going to concentrate on the aspects of it that we can do really, really well, and that require or take advantage of information about what's running in the network, with an affinity to network services. We are probably going to be able to do this better than most people because of the fact that we understand the network elements and the software that runs that aspect of it. We've also said that we will partner with industry leaders in all the other spaces, and we are continuing with that philosophy because it has served us very well. We take companies that we feel have leadership technology, a similar view as to what customer problems are and how customers want to solve those problems, and we then work with them to create a solution. We are continuing down the partnership road for the critical areas that we know customers need, but that other companies already have leadership or a technical expertise in. Therefore we don't have to spend our time there, instead we spend our time interfacing to it and bringing it into the overall system architecture that we put together for how we do this, but absolutely leveraging the work and experience that they have in their part of the market segment. That is doing very well with all the different partnerships we have.