Cisco Systems and its CEO John Chambers are taking an important step toward implementation of the company’s AON (Application-Oriented Network) initiative, designed to create a revolution in application design and network management by bringing intelligence to network infrastructure.At the Cisco Networkers conference in Las Vegas, Chambers announced the formation of the AON business unit.“Perhaps the most exciting thing that we are going to focus on today is literally how intelligence enables IT to not only drive productivity and business process change, but how intelligence in the network changes the IT industry forever. The ability to think about the first network-embedded intelligent message routing system for applications,” Chambers said. “We’re talking about dial tone for applications – the ability to not go though, in your application design, the applications in terms of message routing or event capture or end-to-end security. That should be embedded in the network. If you think about where we were before, you thought about applications and they were completely separate from the network. Quote, the network was transport. But it shouldn’t be,” Chambers said. “There’s a large part of the application that should be embedded in the network. But I would call these regular services if you will, services that are better performed in the network. The ability to ask, how do packets and applications come together in this intelligent network is what the Application Oriented Networking is all about.” Cisco also announced a number of technical relationships, including with IBM, SAP and Tibco, intended to add more intelligence to the network. This added intelligence will in turn equip the network to understand business-application communications in order to support more-effective business decisions.AON supports Cisco’s vision for the Intelligent Information Network, said Stephen Cho, senior director for product management in Cisco’s AON business unit.It is a network-embedded intelligent message routing system that integrates application message-level communication, visibility, and security into the fabric of the network. The AON group will roll out its first products later this year. Initial of-ferings will be a branch-office router and a blade that can be used with Cisco switches. Eventually, the company will add a stand-alone AON device and a branch-office router that connects to SAP applications, Cho said. The AON products will be about the size of a hardback book, he added. Pricing on the products will be announced later this summer. Cisco is hardly going it alone in providing these services. It is also bringing aboard third-party providers who can build add-ons to Cisco’s products. IBM and Tibco Software for instance, will participate in the middleware space, building products that will allow AON to interpret messages sent by those mid-dleware systems. While it might look as if Cisco’s AON and IBM’s Websphere products would compete, IBM officials said the collaboration between the two would work to the customer’s benefit . The goal of the collaboration is to create stronger inte-gration between Websphere and a number of network infrastructure layers by sim-plifying the IT infrastructure, thereby reducing complexity and the total cost of ownership. Another benefit of establishing tighter integration between the two compa-nies’ respective technologies is that the integration can serve as a building block for an SOA, IBM officials said. This in turn can help corporate users cre-ate an on-demand business that better integrates data across the enterprise as well as externally with business partners.“Traditionally Cisco calls on networking guys and we call on a software guys,” said Jeff Henry, IBM’s director of Websphere Product Management. “And so now the two are able to play off one another’s infrastructure much better, espe-cially as our customers start to roll out SOAs. It breaks it down into more con-sumable components. When you use the network and middleware layers together, it provides a good infrastructure for an SOA.” – By Bob Francis and Ed Scannell Technology Industry