Cisco's AON

Last week Cisco officially unveiled a strategy called "Application Oriented
Networking (AON)", which will try to embed what Cisco calls "intelligent
application message routing" technology directly into Cisco's networking
gear. The new technology will allow the network to make routing, security,
and administrative decisions based on application-level information, in a
manner faster and cheaper than current implementations, which can
include multiple layers of hardware and software.

Such devices are becoming more important to service providers and large
enterprise users (two of Cisco's biggest customer groups) because of the
performance, security and administrative problems raised by networks
and applications that span wide geographic areas and cross multiple
network boundaries.

The first fruits of the AON effort will be blades for Cisco's larger 6500
series routers and for its smaller 2600 and 3700 series routers. The AON
announcement also provides a competitive answer to Juniper Networks'
announcement earlier this year to purchase two independent vendors,
Peribit Networks and Redline Networks, in the same technology arena.
Citrix Systems also recently announced purchase NetScaler, another
previously independent entrant in the application-acceleration arena.

Initially the AON technology will use XML hooks to link networking
hardware to applications, to allow for application performance
load-balancing, security and message-based routing tasks. Cisco said
other application protocols, such as IBM's middleware protocol, could
also be used by AON gear in the future.