2005 has been a banner year for service-oriented architectures … and the shift from monolithic apps on silod architecture to services in dynamic compute has introduced very compelling new business opportunities for the networking vendors. For that reason, networking giant Cisco should be one of the most important players to watch in systems management in 2006.In August, Bob Aiken — Director of Academic Research and Technology Initiatives at Cisco — noted that we’re seeing a “blurring of the boundaries between operating systems, networks and middleware.” Earlier this week, Network World’s management beat journalists Denise Dubie and Phil Hochmuth broke the news that Cisco is announcing new ‘application aware’ management products, which would allow customers to “monitor and measure application performance on a network.”Even the novice networking enthusiast is familiar with Cisco’s “intelligence in the network” mantra. Well, today’s convergence of virtualization, loosely-coupled services and dynamic provisioning capabilities could accelerate the network’s role from mere transport of IP packets — to central nervous system for the IT infrastructure. Cisco’s “Application-Oriented Networking” product line compliments a “Server Networking and Virtualization” group that had a very busy year in ’05 — and which is also making forays into system management. I think it’s really interesting to consider the consolidation that will likely take place in the systems management realm in the next year. Over the last couple of years, there’s been an explosion of vendors with dynamic server provisioning capabilities — Opsware, Cassatt, Platform, Data Synapse, Levanta, Egenera, Qlusters, BladeLogic, etc., etc. — the environment is ripe for acquisitions, and Cisco is one of the looming giants that’s up to the task. To me, the question is not ‘if’ Cisco will continue to beef up its systems management capabilities — but ‘when’ they will officially acknowledge that they intend to compete head to head with the Tivolis, Openviews, etc. of the world. As highly distributed applications become normalized in enterprise — the value of “intelligence in the network” keeps getting more compelling for enterprise customers.Today’s industry trends could be playing right into Cisco’s hands. Technology Industry