At first glance, Cisco’s AON (Application Oriented Networking) looks like a brilliant idea. Essentially, it proposes to suck all manner of security, administrative, and even business policy functions into its routers and switches. That looks as if it should benefit everyone – especially existing and prospective Cisco customers – and might even grease the wheels for quicker and easier adoption of SOA.

But it’s by no means clear that the rest of us should uncritically welcome “putting intelligence into the network”. One of the main reasons for the Internet’s success has been its profound indifference to the content of the packets it transports. Compromising on the hallowed principle of “dumb pipes” could crack open Pandora’s box – indeed, several boxes.

In Cisco’s words, AON “makes it possible to embed intelligence capabilities into the network”. Obviously this is a gross exaggeration: all it really does is to teach Cisco’s network devices a bunch of new rote tricks. Any intelligence involved must come from the developers, security specialists and sysadmins who write the rules (no doubt with plenty of help from Cisco’s Advanced Services, which will go to boost AON’s gross margins).

At the marketing level, AON really is a work of genius. It presses every hot button, leaves no fashionable acronym unmentioned, and on top of all that it promises to align IT with business, and cut costs, quickly and with little effort. Specifically, it is said to support Web services, SOA, BPM, and EDA, while supercharging BI, BAM, and RFID. It also helps companies to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and BASEL II. It’s fast, secure, selective, visible, cheap (well, relatively) – and it slices, dices and rices. What’s not to like?

Of course, the primary beneficiary of AON is meant to be Cisco itself. Despite its boast that “The Cisco name has become synonymous with the Internet”, the San Jose giant’s 85 per cent share of the router market in the late 1990s has dropped to somewhere between half and two thirds, depending on which segments you look at. Rivals like Juniper and Alcatel are winning sales and slicing into Cisco’s dominant position.

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