SAN JOSE, Calif., December 6, 2005 - Cisco Systems today announced Application Networking Services as its latest advanced technology, demonstrating the growing customer demand for improved interaction of applications with their enterprise networks.
Using Cisco® Application Networking Services, information technology (IT) organizations can drive higher return on investment (ROI) by improving the performance of critical business applications, while lowering operational costs and expanding IT flexibility. The Cisco Application Networking Services solutions are a core part of the Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) for the enterprise, which enables customers to evolve their IT infrastructures toward the Cisco Intelligent Information Network (IIN).
Large organizations increasingly use software applications to implement core business processes across their extended enterprises. This creates challenges of rapidly increasing infrastructure complexity, the need for consolidation, new network security threats, increasing scale, escalating system integration costs, and the need to deliver optimum application performance to all users regardless of location. Traditional approaches to solving these complex IT problems, such as intensive customization and integration projects, have created additional complexity and new challenges. Cisco Application Networking Services addresses these increasingly complex IT problems by evolving the existing enterprise network infrastructure to scale, deliver, optimize, and integrate applications.
In the July 2005 Forrester Research report, Acquisitions Transform App Acceleration Market, Robert Whiteley wrote, "The market for application acceleration solutions has become a lot less complex over the past 18 months...Enterprises will benefit from having one vendor optimizing their end-to-end business flows. Cisco Systems — with the most complete application acceleration portfolio — is currently best-positioned to lead the market long term..."
Cisco's Application Networking Services solutions combine Cisco's Application Delivery with Cisco's Application-Oriented Networking to help IT departments integrate their applications, optimize their network and improve the delivery of critical applications to users across the enterprise. By bringing these application-focused solutions together into a single advanced technology category, Cisco is providing a complete networking solution for enabling businesses to effectively respond to changing business conditions, in real-time.
"Cisco is helping customers to achieve greater utilization and effectiveness of their IT investments," said Charles Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer, Cisco Systems, Inc. "Our latest advanced technology, Application Networking Services, builds on Cisco's understanding of networked applications to increase enterprises' return on their IT investments. Application Networking Services enhance the deployment, operation, and delivery of business applications to increase the productivity of IT and of users across the extended enterprise."
Cisco Application Delivery products improve application-to-user communication by delivering application content efficiently, securely and manageably between application servers and web browsers. Cisco's solutions are deployed transparently at various points across the network (e.g. data-center, WAN edge, and branch office) to allow organizations to consolidate applications and branch servers, while efficiently delivering highly secure application services to end users.
Cisco Application-Oriented Networking (AON) products improve application-to-application communication and offload infrastructure functions such as logging, security, messaging, etc. into the network. AON operates at the application message level (e.g. purchase order, stock trade) and can apply policies to business messages depending on content and context.
Cisco's Advanced Technologies
Cisco's advanced technologies are new categories that fit into the company's long-term technology vision, have the potential to grow to $1 billion in revenue for Cisco over the next five to seven years and are part of a market where Cisco has the potential to achieve a number 1 or number 2 market position. To date, Cisco has announced eight advanced technology areas - digital video, enterprise IP communications, home networking, hosted small-business solutions, optical networking, security, storage area networking, and wireless technologies. Application Networking Services is the most recent addition to this portfolio.
Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) for the Enterprise
Cisco SONA is the architecture for building an Intelligent Information Network in the enterprise. The network is the common platform that transparently connects and enables all components of IT infrastructure. This ubiquity uniquely allows the network to deliver a new set of common services to more flexibly and optimally align applications and IT resources through the network fabric. Cisco Application Networking Services are critical components of the interactive services layer in SONA and also take full advantage of capabilities provided by other shared services in both the foundation and application layers. With an investment in an intelligent network, enterprises can improve the effectiveness of IT resources overall, as well as reduce maintenance and operational costs - empowering customers to invest in new strategic technologies. For more information on Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture, visit www.cisco.com/go/sona.
Cisco Lifecycle Services
For enterprises to adopt the appropriate deployment strategy for Application Networking Services and SONA, a Cisco Lifecycle Services engagement with Cisco and its partners provides businesses with the knowledge and skills required for successful implementations. This robust portfolio of lifecycle support services provides a systematic, validated and proven approach that can be tailored to individual customer needs to help ensure customer success, accelerate time to market and increase IT efficiency and utilization.
