6/27/2005 -- Cisco Systems Inc. last week announced one of its most ambitious technology programs to date: Application-Oriented Networking (AON).

The networking giant says AON will foster the creation of intelligent networks that are better suited for business-application communications and which can support more effective and efficient business decision-making.

This isn’t necessarily the most radical aspect of AON, either. Because in proposing its vision of an intelligent, business-aware network infrastructure, Cisco is also positioning AON as an alternative to the traditional, message brokers and other software-based middleware that are today used for the same purpose. “[T]he AON solution ... enables Cisco to position network infrastructure as a tool for increasing visibility and performance of transactional exchanges typically handled entirely in software by a middleware agent,” write Joel Conover and Shawn Willett, principal analysts with consultancy Current Analysis Inc. “This architecture enables Cisco to capture a greater degree of the dollars traditionally spent on integration and custom software development, while potentially helping customers to reduce system management overhead by reducing the number of resources necessary to manage high volume transactional data.”

In this respect, Conover and Willett write, AON is a shot fired across the collective bow of IBM Corp., TIBCO and other messaging middleware vendors.

“Cisco’s AON is a direct and powerful threat to TIBCO, IBM and others in the high-end messaging space. In addition to acceleration services, Cisco is offering message-level security including digital signatures, encryption, as well as some user level security such as authentication and PKI,” they note. “Cisco is even ahead of much of the traditional EAI (enterprise application integration) market with its business event capabilities, essentially allowing events to be closely monitored and filtered and fed up to an enterprise console” of either Cisco’s or a third-party vendor’s design.

AON should be a threat to the message brokering powers that be on still another front, too. “The big eye opener is the price. Cisco is planning average selling prices in the 40K range, much below traditional messaging/EAI software,” Conover and Willet write.

That being said, the pair allow, AON won’t make Cisco an overnight market leader. For starters, Conover and Willett stress, it’s immature—relative to both software-based EAI offerings, as well as competing messaging acceleration products from DataPower and other vendors.

“Cisco should at least consider a low-level process tool and better transformation and B2B connection management,” they write, adding that “AON is also a closed system with its own hardware, although adapters do allow it to link into other messaging systems or an SOA.”

What’s more, EAI competitors and others could soon strike back against Cisco, challenging AON on the performance front, in particular.

“Vendors such as TIBCO, IBM, Sonic and others have well-developed software for distributed processing, QoS, caching and other performance and availability that runs on general purpose hardware. These firms have extensive, if largely proprietary, benchmarking and have references in high-performance messaging in stock markets and other areas for years,” Conover and Willett comment. “Cisco should try to come up with some neutral benchmarking, perhaps in concert with other vendors in this space.”

In spite of their caveats and concern, Conover and Willett see AON as a bold move that has a very good chance of success.

“The main advantage of this scheme is higher performance, availability and more discrete targeting of processes for Quality-of-Service-type features,” they conclude. “The first round of AON targets messaging, transformation, security (authentication, authorization, encryption) and event processing, in industries such as financial services, retail, logistics and government. These are market areas where performance matters greatly and targeting certain processes can have a great effect on business operations. The price advantage will also favor Cisco. In essence, this is a well-targeted, well-thought out foray into software that has a good chance of seeing success.” -Stephen Swoyer