InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 6, 1999
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Networking vendor flexes its enterprise muscle by offering management software and transforming IBM into a services partner
By Brian Riggs and Bob Wallace
Cisco this week will leverage its strong position in the enterprise to make further inroads in the communications service provider market. The network equipment maker will introduce software that lets IT managers and their WAN service providers monitor service-level agreements. The product follows a display of Cisco dominance in the enterprise networking arena last week, when the company effectively transformed IBM from a competitor to a supplier of components and a partner that provides IT services. The humbling of IBM follows a lengthy acquisition spree aimed at bolstering Cisco's role as a provider of networking gear for service providers such as phone companies.
The moves show that Cisco wants to do more than sell switches and routers. The company is aggressively expanding its role as a supplier of equipment for phone companies, directly competing with vendors such as Lucent Technologies Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. Cisco is also increasing its presence in the network integration, IT consulting, and professional services markets.
For IT managers, Cisco's strategy--if successful--would mean enterprise voice, data, and other kinds of traffic would be handled by a common infrastructure of Cisco switches and routers, regardless of whether it travels over a LAN or WAN, a private or public network. It's an attractive prospect to many IT managers.
"We're looking to Cisco to provide a high level of integration between its enterprise and service-provider products," says George Deyett, a network design manager at Polaroid Corp., which uses Cisco switches and routers in its worldwide network. "Using common platforms that work together would make life easier for me."
Cisco already said this latest effort to join enterprise and service provider networks is its Service Level Agreement Manager, a component of the CiscoWorks 2000 Service Level Management Suite. Slam runs on Windows NT or Unix servers and collects performance data--such as network availability, delay, and packet latency--from Cisco equipment used by service providers to offer hosted applications, virtual private networks, Internet access, and other services. Slam includes a software developers' kit that uses an Extensible Markup Language interface to link it with other applications. Cisco also plans to launch an integration program this week to provide links to other vendors' management packages.
"The strategy really brings end-to-end service-level management closer to reality," says John Morency, an analyst at Renaissance Worldwide. He says the software can measure performance between routers, and vendors will be able to use this data for end-to-end monitoring. "Before, there was no guarantee that data collected by one program could be used by another program," Morency says.
Full-Service Effort
"Cisco is positioned to serve both sides of the market--enterprises and service providers--better than anyone else. Slam is a great example of what they're doing to pull both together," says Bob Pinney, a senior network engineer at Turner Broadcasting System Inc. in Atlanta. Turner has a 200-site worldwide network comprising 75 Cisco routers and 600 Cisco switches, and is almost entirely a Cisco shop. The new service-level software will let Pinney monitor link performance and measure delay on a streaming video app or jitter on a voice-over-IP service.
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isco Systems is not satisfied with being the main supplier of enterprise data networks. It apparently wants to expand its reach across the entire world of communications.
Slam isn't Cisco's only play in the service-provider market. Last month, Cisco spent nearly $7 billion for Cerent Corp., a developer of high-speed fiber-optic equipment that lets service providers better manage bandwidth on backbone networks. That was the latest move in a drive the vendor launched more than a year ago--which it calls Cisco Powered Networks--to place Cisco gear with service providers and create end-to-end Cisco networks that span business networks and public networks operated by phone companies.
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