Cisco Cisco Application Performance Assurance Network Module Libro blanco

Important notices, privacy statements, and trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. can be found on cisco.com.

Page 2 of 8

A case in point is the IT department at Cisco. By 2002, Cisco had developed more than five hosted environments to provide information and

business-to-business (B2B) services to customers, partners, and suppliers. These environments evolved piecemeal over the years and reflected the

various technologies in use at the time and the particular needs of each Cisco business unit. Although Cisco had begun to implement SOA and Web

services a few years ago, each department still implemented its new technologies in an isolated fashion 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.

Like Cisco, the industry’s initial steps into distributed and service-oriented computing continue to require that essential messaging and collaboration

services be embedded into endpoint applications or isolated into middleware stacks that serve certain applications. To date, implementing wide-

ranging application-level collaboration in this new distributed environment has required an ever-increasing proliferation of systems from application

servers to load balancers to message brokers to various appliances and integration middleware.

Note:

For general information on the evolution of application integration, see Cisco AON’s Application Infrastructure Primer for Network

Professionals at

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6438/prod_white_papers_list.html

These problems are common across any large enterprise. Worldwide financial firms, for example, face challenges in their application infrastructures

that are typical for many firms today. To keep pace with the dramatic changes occurring in the financial services industry such as consolidations, to

facilitate better and faster collaboration with global offices, and to meet new compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, firms have been forced

to extend their systems into numerous isolated applications.

Across many industries today, companies are contending with complex application environments and business ecosystems consisting of hundreds

and even thousands of distributed and service-oriented applications or services (Figure 1). Facing a corresponding increase in customer expectations,

companies must learn how to be flexible while handling this complexity and yet maintain control. How can they enhance communications within

these application architectures burdened with isolated applications and specialized system services so they can adapt quickly and transparently to

ever-changing business needs? And how can companies dramatically improve on the current, unacceptable one-year timeframe and multiple person-

years of specialized effort required to develop, integrate, and implement custom-developed projects?

Figure 1. Applications Have Been Moving to a Distributed Architecture