SAN JOSE – Cisco's plan to open up its venerable IOS routing software to customers and third-party developers is a bold move designed to further the company's push to make the network the epicenter of the virtual data center.

Since its debut more than 20 years ago, IOS has largely been a closed, proprietary, tightly guarded jewel in Cisco's lockbox. But the company's ambitions to make the network the platform for all IT operations and become a software force are in turn forcing Cisco to give up a little in return – like making IOS more than just a platform for Cisco-developed services.

"It's a significant step forward for us," said Don Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco's newly formed Software Group, at last week's C-Scape 2007 analyst conference. "Software turns out to be a key way that we can do what [we've] been talking about for some time, which is link business architecture to technology architecture in a meaningful way."

Cisco plans to "componentize" IOS – developing only one implementation of a specific function instead of several, depending on the image – dynamically link IOS services and move the software onto a Unix-based kernel. Cisco then plans to open up interfaces on IOS to allow third-party and customer-developed applications to access IOS services.

However, no timeframe for doing so was provided.

Analysts say the plan is key to Cisco's heightened ambitions in the data center and software.

"I think it's a smart – and necessary – move to create APIs so that infrastructure can speak to IOS-enabled devices," says Rob Whiteley of Forrester Research. "If you think about it, the network is one of the least programmable pieces of the infrastructure. The automation and orchestration market is far more oriented towards servers, storage and desktop environments. The ability to dynamically change the network is a missing component. However, the recent push for virtualization is now shining a bright spotlight on just how statically configured most enterprise networks are. But now that the network is a bottleneck for virtualization, companies are eager to rethink that environment."

Others agree, though the benefits for enterprise customers may be a ways off.

"This is a nice sense of direction statement – it says that Cisco understands that SOA and Web 2.0 are fundamentally changing how applications are built," says Jim Metzler of Ashton Metzler and Associates. "My feeling is that it is going to take a lot of work to open up IOS. That is most likely why they didn't give any timeframe. I don't think it will have much impact on enterprise IOS users for quite a while."