SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 20, 2001 Cisco Systems, Inc., the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, today announced additions to its network management solutions with the availability of the CiscoWorks Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Health Monitor and enhancements to the CiscoWorks family targeted at converged networks. Cisco today also announced the Cisco 1105 Hosting Solution Engine for managing e-commerce data center environments.

Supporting Cisco AVVID the Cisco Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data - these new solutions reaffirm Cisco's ongoing commitment to provide customers with comprehensive management tools that maximize network performance and drive e-business success.

New CiscoWorks VoIP Health Monitor

The CiscoWorks VoIP Health Monitor is a new suite of integrated applications that proactively monitors converged networks supporting VoIP. The suite verifies VoIP system reliability by providing real-time status reports on the voice "health" in converged networks, and notifying users of potential problems in the Cisco routed and switched infrastructure.

This management application suite consisting of Voice Health Monitor, Device Fault Manager, and CiscoView supports more than 175 of the most common Cisco devices, including Cisco routers, Catalyst switches, Cisco CallManager, router gateways, and in-line power cards. With this solution, users can monitor network uptime and, as a result, optimize performance of business-critical applications enabled by Cisco AVVID.

New Enhancements to CiscoWorks Family

The VoIP Health Monitor complements other Cisco management solutions such as the CiscoWorks QoS Policy Manager and CiscoWorks Service Management Solution giving customers a robust set of tools for converged network and policy management.

The CiscoWorks QoS Policy Manager provides centralized management and control of network-wide QoS policies letting customers prioritize business-critical traffic, such as voice. In addition to enabling rules-based setting of high-level policies, QoS Policy Manager now includes specific VoIP policy recommendations for different areas of the network. These VoIP templates, which can be user-customized, simplify deployment of QoS and help ensure the quality of the voice deployment.

CiscoWorks Service Management Solution proactively tests and measures end-to-end network service levels to maximize high-quality, economic delivery of converged network services. This solution now lets customers more effectively test the voice readiness of their network through the ability to set Service Level Agreement (SLA)-specific threshold notification. This enables more immediate notification if voice or other business-critical service levels are not being met minimizing downtime and increasing overall operational productivity

"The CiscoWorks product family offers valuable IP Telephony management tools for Cisco AVVID networks," said Patrick Olson, Director of Information Technology at Menlo College. "The VoIP Health Monitor gives us comprehensive, instantaneous network status and fault analysis information, which are critical to ensuring peak network performance. Significant savings in time and effort have also been realized using the pre-defined voice templates in the new version of QoS Policy Manager. Operationally, these tools enable Menlo College to provide proper IP Telephony availability and quality for our students and staff."

Cisco 1105 Hosting Solution Engine

Designed for comprehensive management of e-business hosting infrastructure and Layer 4-7 hosted services, the Cisco 1105 Hosting Solution Engine is specifically geared for enterprise and service provider customers with e-business data center facilities. This turnkey, hardware-based solution offers integrated Layer 2-3 network infrastructure fault and performance monitoring with Layer 4-7 hosted services monitoring and activation. It provides robust operational support for all Cisco routers, switches, server load balancers, and PIX firewalls. Customers can more effectively manage their data centers, ensuring e-business solution reliability and success while significantly minimizing downtime.

"Network reliability and performance are critical to providing successful and profitable hosted e-business solutions," said Andrea Ferravante, Director of Marketing at AONET, an Italy-based Application Service Provider (ASP). "The Cisco 1105 Hosting Solution Engine supports this with comprehensive hosted infrastructure and services management capabilities significantly reducing network downtime, improving overall network and IT personnel productivity. This enables us to offer new profitable managed services to our customers."

With a flexible user security model, the Cisco Hosting Solution Engine extends its routine management capabilities to network administrators and other critical e-business personnel. By utilizing the user security model, server managers tasked with managing the Web server farms can now access functionality on Cisco load balancing devices where access was once limited to the network administrator. Customers gain overall IT personnel productivity.

The Cisco Hosting Solution Engine also offers a customizable Web-based graphical user interface (GUI). This enables hosting service providers to offer network and Layer 4-7 service management capabilities to their customers as a revenue-generating managed e-business service. This GUI personalization capability also lets service providers evolve their hosted business models rapidly when necessary.

"The introduction of the CiscoWorks VoIP Health Monitor and Cisco 1105 Hosting Solution Engine demonstrate Cisco's continued investment in the development of industry-leading management solutions for the rapidly evolving network infrastructure," said Jeff Krause, VP and General Manager of the Enterprise Management Business Unit at Cisco Systems. "Both complement Cisco's broad network management portfolio of products effectively managing e-business solutions enabled by Cisco AVVID."

Pricing and Availability

The CiscoWorks VoIP Health Monitor is available today for $19, 995 USD. The CiscoWorks QoS Policy Manager is available today for $9,995 USD. The CiscoWorks Service Management Solution is available today for $14,995 USD. The Cisco 1105 Hosting Solutions Engine will be available in mid-September for $19,995 USD.