Cisco Cisco Application Performance Assurance Network Module Prospecto
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CUSTOMER NAME
•
Cisco IT
INDUSTRY
•
Networking
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
•
Consolidate disparate B2B and
Web-hosted environments
Web-hosted environments
•
Reduce the significant infrastructure,
maintenance, and development costs
of hosting disparate environments
maintenance, and development costs
of hosting disparate environments
•
Eliminate inconsistent implementation
of application-level security policy
of application-level security policy
NETWORK SOLUTION
•
Cisco Application-Oriented Networking
products provide intelligent network-
based infrastructure services.
Embedding these services in the
network fabric enables applications to
communicate more effectively and to
extend information resources
transparently across the extended
enterprise.
products provide intelligent network-
based infrastructure services.
Embedding these services in the
network fabric enables applications to
communicate more effectively and to
extend information resources
transparently across the extended
enterprise.
BUSINESS VALUE
•
Lowered capital and operating costs
by unifying functions in the network
by unifying functions in the network
•
Greater application-level security by
using enforceable enterprise policy
using enforceable enterprise policy
•
Dramatically increased visibility into
business activities and infrastructure
events
business activities and infrastructure
events
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
CISCO IT DEPARTMENT DEPLOYS INNOVATIVE CISCO APPLICATION-
ORIENTED NETWORKING SOLUTION
Visionary Technology Provides New Model for Application Infrastructure Services
BACKGROUND
The mission of the Cisco Systems
®
business-to-business (B2B) operation is to become “the easiest
company to do e-business with.” To further this mission, Cisco
®
is in the process of deploying
Cisco Application-Oriented Networking (AON), the first and only network-embedded intelligent
message routing system that enables applications and the network to work together as an integrated
system.
CHALLENGE
The Cisco IT department manages a mix of dissimilar hosted environments that thousands of
customers, partners, and suppliers use to interact with Cisco. Customers order products or search
for information on these sites, and partners and suppliers purchase products, check order status,
manage inventory, and track the fulfillment of orders. These environments evolved over the years
and reflect the various technologies in use at the time and the particular needs of each Cisco
business unit (Figure 1). Some also had to be designed for compatibility with the particular needs
and technologies of various partners.
As part of a new initiative to become a “process-driven enterprise” that would enable Cisco to
deploy new business initiatives more quickly, Cisco committed itself a few years ago to building a
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). An SOA is based on a technology model in which business
functions are organized as a collection of services, each with a clear business identity and strict
formal interfaces. This model differs from earlier methodologies that relied on custom
development and proprietary interfaces and were, therefore, largely inflexible and difficult to
change.
To implement an SOA approach, Cisco deployed new integration technologies in each of its hosted
environments including Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools and Web services based on
Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Standard Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard.
Although these technologies helped overcome earlier challenges by bridging incompatible
application protocols in each environment, each was implemented in isolation using disparate tools to manage and secure these services. The result
has been a patchwork of integration technologies that have been costly to maintain and difficult to manage without a consistent, standardized way to
implement, manage, and secure services across all of the environments.
The maze of patchwork technologies is especially difficult in a B2B situation when, for example, a Cisco executive wants to see a complete view of
all transactions between Cisco and a particular customer. To gain this perspective, a Cisco analyst must access each environment using different
tools and processes, download the necessary information, and then combine this into a meaningful report. This process could take days to
accomplish and still might not capture all the relevant information.