Cisco one day would like to be known as much for IT infrastructure management as it is for routers and switches - at least that's the general industry belief, even if the company hasn't said so outright.

What Cisco has said is that it plans to develop management applications that leverage advanced instrumentation, as well as connect to systems-management software for optimizing performance and troubleshooting. The goal, through intelligent hardware and virtualization, is "to reduce complexity and enable greater synergy with system-management vendors, rather than less, by allowing users to see what's happening in the network," says Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president of Cisco's network management technology group.

Cisco's recent acquisition of Sheer Networks' abstraction software, which was used in part for the Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) product suite Cisco announced in December, is one manifestation of the company's management goals. Another is its Application-Oriented Network strategy. With initiatives such as these underway, Cisco will be able to manage diverse networks more easily, Meltzer contends.

But that's just the beginning of Cisco's management ambitions, industry watchers say. Many speculate that the vendor's long-term goals include providing a broad IT infrastructure-management platform for networks, storage and servers. With this platform, Cisco ultimately will go up against system-management stalwarts Computer Associates, HP and IBM, as well as today's rising stars in network management.

Interest in Cisco's management story is great, but skepticism is greater. Many industry watchers aren't so sure the powerhouse can translate its network hardware success to the management software market.

"From the Sheer acquisition, Cisco gets proven management software and technology that improves the interoperability between Cisco gear and systems-management vendors," says Robert Whiteley, analyst at Forrester Research. However, to lay the groundwork for its vision of holistic IT management, "Cisco must ensure that the interfaces for Sheer's technology evolve into true industry standards," he adds.

If Cisco does focus its strategy on open standards that will let users pick the best management tools, it will have huge market push, says Jim Hull, vice president of engineering services at MasterCard International in Purchase, N.Y. "People like me will say, 'Let me have three,'" he says.