Cisco's new technology tackles the problem of communication between applications from different software vendors, writes John Collins

As widely predicted, networking giant Cisco last week announced plans to expand beyond its traditional market of providing the hardware that runs the networks of big businesses and telecoms providers with the announcement of a new technology called AON (application-oriented networking).

The new technology, developed over the last two years, tackles a perennial problem of the technology industry - getting applications from different software vendors to effectively communicate with each other.

Up to now that problem has been solved through a combination of expensive custom development work and a class of software known as middleware.

Current industry best practice says that applications should be integrated based around messaging, i.e. getting the applications to send messages to each other via some third party broker that translates them into a language they both understand.

This broker is known as an enterprise service bus and generally uses the emerging web services standards to do its translation.

Web services clearly has huge potential as an integration tool with Irish companies such as Iona Technologies and Cape Clear among those pushing it in that direction, yet there is still massive demand for any technology that can ease the burden of integration.

According to Nick Earle, vice president for marketing, planning and operations with Cisco EMEA, 25 years ago integrating software systems accounted for about 25 per cent of the total project cost.

During the dotcom boom, when businesses were desperately trying to internet-enable their processes, the cost of integration rose to 50 per cent. Now he says the average company can expect to spend 50-70 per cent of its IT budget integrating components.

Given that Cisco dominates the networking hardware market with over 70 per cent of market share, but in a market that accounts for only 5 per cent of overall IT spending, it is clear why it wants to get a piece of the application integration pie.

Earle explains AON is the third phase in Cisco's "intelligent information network" strategy where it is adding additional functions and services to its network equipment which previously would have been additional purchases.

In the first phase, Cisco introduced equipment that enabled customers to channel voice, video and data traffic over a single network using internet protocol (IP).

The second phase involved releasing technology which enabled network components to be virtualised, ie managed in a much more flexible manner.

"Wasn't middleware supposed to solve the problem of integration?" says Earle. "But there is still a fundamental gap between applications, business processes and the network. The network touches everything in the business but it doesn't understand what the data is - it is just moving the packets around."

What Cisco's new technology aims to do is to tie the applications and the network together by giving routers and other devices on the network the intelligence to understand what the data are that it is transporting.

Initially AON will carry out relatively straightforward tasks such as providing alerts, applying security policies, translating data from one format to another or routing it to a particular location based on its contents.

"This is not some magic powder we have invented," says Earle. "We are taking some of what has been done with middleware, the low-hanging fruit such as protocol transfer, and dropping that to the network."

It's a strategy that has worked for Cisco before. It has successfully integrated technologies such as firewalls, IP telephony, and virtual private networks into its networking hardware. In some instances Cisco has been the leader, in others it has followed, but there is a general industry trend towards networking hardware becoming more intelligent.

Application-oriented networking will initially appear in Cisco switches and routers but the company is carefully controlling the roll-out.

It does not want customers to try the technology in its embryonic stage and then write it off because it does not deliver what they require.

Cisco has identified financial services, retail, logistics and transportation, and government as sectors that have problems that AON can help to solve.

Senior Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini said that while he wasn't sure the launch of AON was a disruptive event as claimed by Cisco, he said it was certainly unusual. "It is interesting to see the world of networking - which for me is a commodity - and the world of application integration colliding."

Pezzini believes there is a number of reasons why application integration is such an important issue for business. It ensures there is a single version of data rather than unconnected data stored in multiple databases, it allows business processes to be changed more easily, and provides a single view of the customer.

That Cisco's approach will become the standard way of doing application integration is far from certain and Earle admits that it will be at least five to seven years before it is as ubiquitous as IP telephony - another feature that Cisco added to its network hardware in spite of industry thinking.

"We don't want this launch to come across as a science project," says Earle. "We want people to see it as real - we are using the technology ourselves to secure our business-to-business website, it is live in a number of customer pilots and other industry heavyweights like SAP and IBM are backing it."

Not only does AON move Cisco into lucrative new markets for its hardware but it also opens up revenues from the services that will need to be provided to optimise its use - an average of 40-50 per cent in the pilot projects to date.

"This opens a door for us to grow into new markets," says Earle.