Cisco Systems designated Application Networking Services as its latest advanced technology — a market opportunity that the company believes has the potential to grow to $1 billion in revenue over the next five to seven years.
The goal of Application Networking Services is to help information technology (IT) organizations 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).
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.
http://www.cisco.com/go/sona
- In June 2005, Cisco Systems unveiled its vision for Application-Oriented Networking (AON) — a new initiative and set of technologies designed to move beyond the packet level to read application-to-application messages flowing within the network.
- The Cisco AON family complements current Cisco packet and content-aware products by providing true application message-level awareness of business applications. An AON-enabled router would not only examine the data packets that flow through it but would also look inside some of those packets to see what the messages say. For example, a company might write a business rule that tells the router to send an email to a customer service representative every time an order over $1,000 goes to the warehouse.
- The first set of products have included AON modules for the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series and the Cisco 2600/2800/3700/3800 series enterprise routers.