Cisco's recent announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire Sheer Networks http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/080105-cisco-sheer.html?rl, a developer of network and service management software products, represents a major strategic IT management market reversal, as well as an endorsement of emerging technology. With the Sheer acquisition, Cisco's strategic shift towards multi-vendor IT infrastructure management represents a major change of market focus for Cisco, and may have a significant impact on the IT management market in general.
 
For Cisco customers who previously had devoted enormous amounts of time and capital to integrate functional IT management infrastructures from multi-vendor products, the Sheer acquisition holds the promise of reducing this deployment burden. Cisco and its numerous IT management partners have gained through this acquisition an integration platform for a wide variety of IT management products, thus lifting much of the integration and deployment burden off the customer's shoulders. 

Sheer and other judicious acquisitions, along with Cisco well-focused partnerships, will, in time, enable Cisco customers to easily "mix and match" the IT management functionality best suitable to individual customer requirements and budgets. All this is possible in part because Cisco, in the past few years, has already made significant investments in its IT management capability through internal development such as Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR) and Application-Oriented Networking (AON), partnerships such as with Opnet http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/accel/2005/0328netop2.html?rl, and acquisitions such as NetSolve http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/0909ciscotoac.html?rl. Moreover, the recent acquisition of Topspin Communications, a grid server manufacturer, enables Cisco to package IT management for its customers on high performance systems platforms. Whichever route Cisco may take, Cisco will likely have an impact on the IT management marketplace qualitatively and quantitatively.

Sheer's most distinctive feature is its Dynamic Network Abstraction (DNA) network modeling functionality. DNA supports the execution of network management tasks, such as fault management, and enables the rapid development of additional management functionality. The DNA network modeling functionality enables IT to:

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.