* Cisco targets application performance management
Cisco is known for many things in the networked world – from leading the market for LAN switching and WAN routing, to providing voice and wireless gear, to jumping into IT infrastructure management. Couple the latter with its WAN optimization technologies, and Cisco could become a dominant presence yet another market: network application performance management.
The company’s recent acquisition of Sheer Networks armed Cisco with technology to integrate multiple management products and equipped Cisco with the power to manage multi-vendor gear. While no specific product plans have been revealed, Cisco executives have made it clear the vendor is aggressively working to increase its offerings in heterogeneous network management as well as to incorporate information collected from software systems, applications and business services.
“We need a system, an open approach to resolve the issue of different management products from different vendors for different devices. There should be one tool for the operator to learn for provisioning and troubleshooting at the network and services level,” says Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president of Cisco’s Network Management Technology Group.
The acquisition of Sheer, as well as two purchases last year of Jahi Networks, a maker of software programming interfaces for network management, and NetSolve, a management service provider, bring heterogeneous network management technology and experience into Cisco’s development labs that had previously churned out predominantly proprietary tools targeted at specific Cisco products.
Even with all the recent talk of network and IT infrastructure management, don’t discount Cisco’s plans to continue improving application performance over the WAN. The company this year introduced its Application-Oriented Networking (AON) initiative, purchased Actona last year and bought FineGround Networks earlier this year – all of which give Cisco an advantage in WAN optimization with wide-area file services and application acceleration technology.
“Cisco is hearing from its customers that they don’t want a lot of different boxes to optimize WAN performance or ensure network performance,” says George Hamilton, a senior analyst with Yankee Group. “Cisco has a real opportunity to be a leader and create an ecosystem of management that allows people to virtualize the network layer and manage performance.”
