October 8, 2002

Cisco Systems has a strong history in driving the development and implementation of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) solutions. Cisco recently introduced a new MPLS solution that delivers bandwidth protection and provides a cost-effective alternative to SONET/SDH protection. Using MPLS Traffic Engineering Fast Reroute in Cisco IOS® Software and an offline application called Tunnel Builder Pro, this solution ensures bandwidth protection at a network-wide level, and increases network resiliency.

News@Cisco recently spoke with Sangeeta Anand, vice president of Product Marketing for Cisco's Internet Technologies Division, about Cisco's strategy for continuing to drive MPLS development on behalf of the industry.

Could you briefly describe Cisco's role in driving MPLS development?
Cisco has been and continues to be at the forefront of MPLS development. Cisco invented Tag Switching, the basis for MPLS, and was the first to ship MPLS more than five years ago. Today, Cisco offers the broadest set of solutions and platform support for MPLS.

Cisco fully endorses the standardization process, and is either author or co-author of all key Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards drafts for MPLS development. George Swallow chairs the IETF MPLS working group. We also recognize the importance of multi-vendor interoperability. To that end, we have participated successfully in more interoperability tests than any other vendor.

Driving development of a technology isn't enough, though. You have to make the technology deployable, really useful in a production network environment. Cisco has a very strong history in MPLS deployment. We were the first to deploy MPLS in a production environment, the first to deploy traffic engineering, and the first to deploy MPLS virtual private networks (VPNs). And with more than 140 customer deployments, the Cisco MPLS solution is deployed in more networks than any other vendor.

Speaking of customer deployments, MPLS has largely been a service provider technology. Do you expect to see enterprises begin to deploy MPLS in the near term?
MPLS has been traditionally perceived as a service provider technology. However, a number of large enterprise customers resemble tier 2 (i.e., have a national footprint) and tier 3 (i.e., those with a regional footprint) service providers. In fact, they have "internal subscribers" to whom they provide services. As a result, we are increasingly seeing interest from large enterprises, with a number of them having deployed MPLS or testing it for production networks. This includes the capability to offer VPNs-both Layer 2 and Layer 3. Since the topologies resemble service providers, technologies like traffic engineering (TE) and Quality of Service (QoS) are also being added to the offering.

What's next on the horizon for MPLS development?
MPLS as a technology delivers both Layer 2 and Layer 3 services and is a key "catalyst" technology to bringing Layer 2 and Layer 3 functions together on a single network. We believe this central value proposition of MPLS will be enhanced to offer additional revenue streams as well as substantial cost-savings for customers interested in deploying MPLS. This will imply a tighter integration of VPNs and TE with three central technologies-availability, QoS and security-in the future.

The next level of profitability comes from bundled services based on MPLS VPNs. Managed shared services such as IP address management will allow providers to generate additional revenue streams. For example, we will be enhancing the multicast VPN solutions to help our service provider customers meet the increasing demands for optimized and scaleable delivery of multicast applications traffic. The increased integration of IP services and multicast with MPLS will enable additional revenue streams for our customers thereby enabling a higher degree of managed shared services.

Moving MPLS from an efficient packet encapsulation mechanism that delivers services to a carrier/PTT/RBOC environment poses a big challenge in the areas of scalability, QoS and management. We will be adding several features to enable MPLS to meet the evolving requirements of carrier networks. We will also be increasing our focus on Operations, Administration, Maintenance & Provisioning (OAM&P) capabilities to satisfy key requirements from carriers and PTTs.