Cisco Adds App Services

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems® today announced Application Networking Services as its latest advanced technology, demonstrating the growing customer demand for improved interaction of applications with their enterprise networks.

Using Cisco® Application Networking Services, information technology (IT) organizations can 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).

Large organizations increasingly use software applications to implement core business processes across their extended enterprises. This creates challenges of rapidly increasing infrastructure complexity, the need for consolidation, new network security threats, increasing scale, escalating system integration costs, and the need to deliver optimum application performance to all users regardless of location. Traditional approaches to solving these complex IT problems, such as intensive customization and integration projects, have created additional complexity and new challenges. Cisco Application Networking Services addresses these increasingly complex IT problems by evolving the existing enterprise network infrastructure to scale, deliver, optimize, and integrate applications.

In the July 2005 Forrester Research report, Acquisitions Transform App Acceleration Market, Robert Whiteley wrote, "The market for application acceleration solutions has become a lot less complex over the past 18 months...Enterprises will benefit from having one vendor optimizing their end-to-end business flows. Cisco Systems -- with the most complete application acceleration portfolio -- is currently best-positioned to lead the market long term..."

Cisco's Application Networking Services solutions combine Cisco's Application Delivery with Cisco's Application-Oriented Networking to help IT departments integrate their applications, optimize their network and improve the delivery of critical applications to users across the enterprise. By bringing these application-focused solutions together into a single advanced technology category, Cisco is providing a complete networking solution for enabling businesses to effectively respond to changing business conditions, in real-time.

"Cisco is helping customers to achieve greater utilization and effectiveness of their IT investments," said Charles Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer, Cisco Systems, Inc. "Our latest advanced technology, Application Networking Services, builds on Cisco's understanding of networked applications to increase enterprises' return on their IT investments. Application Networking Services enhance the deployment, operation, and delivery of business applications to increase the productivity of IT and of users across the extended enterprise."

Cisco Systems Inc.