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Analysts confused with Cisco's SONA initiative

September 21, 2006

As a whole, Cisco is continuing its push for the relevance of its networking products to application-layer computing. However, this has more than one industry analyst unconvinced by Cisco’s idea of SONA (service-oriented network architecture).

September’s announcement that the company will partner with SAP AG did absolutely nothing to improve or change that perception in any way. If anything, it probably caused even more confusion in the industry.

To be sure, industry analyst Frank Dzubeck describes Cisco’s SONA agreement with SAP as no more than a platform for marketing.

Dzubeck, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based research firm Communications Network Architects Inc. says “We’re talking about marketing versus reality here. Governance and risk is the hot button for every company right now and this is where it starts to become complicated.”

Dzubeck says Cisco really doesn’t understand how complex application performance and integration can be. “There’s a different mindset to the way you attack a problem from an IT perspective versus a networking perspective,” says Dzubeck.

Gartner’s Mark Fabbi says he’s disappointed with SONA and remains sceptical about whether Cisco’s products actually incorporate the ability to provide application intelligence in any practical way.

Overall, Cisco will have to undergo a radical culture shift to get to the point of being credible with SONA, says Fabbi, v.p. and lead analyst for Gartner’s enterprise network infrastructure group.

“Any time you challenge Cisco on SONA or IIN (Intelligent Information Network) and some of these fancy architectural things they like to talk about, they almost immediately revert to talking about switching and routing,” he says.

Cisco lives and breathes moving data around, says Fabbi, because that’s what the company knows. But to avoid being commoditized as a low-layer networking company, Cisco has to learn to live and breathe applications and complex data centre environments.

Cisco also needs to show tangible proof that its products can impact business productivity, says Fabbi. According to Bill Ruh, Cisco’s vice-president of advanced services, the components that make up SONA generally encompass the entire breadth of Cisco’s product range!

SONA is the architecture that extends the network as a platform to having many other services,” explains Bill Ruh, “and those services are available to the users, the infrastructure and the applications.” SAP’s GRC Repository application, for example, will use Cisco’s AON (Application-Oriented Networking) technology and CS MARS (Security Monitoring and Response System) to flag application messages for any policy transgressions.

Building an events service into GRC, where the network looks for security and application events, allows the application to be proactive, says Ruh. “You’re able to see in real-time that an event is occurring and you can proactively do something about that particular event and in real time.”

Ruh offers as a practical example an email that might contain one or more social security numbers. With AON providing application information to the GRC application, and CS MARS providing security event information, the GRC application can stop that email if it’s outside accepted company policy.

Organizations can closely examine their SOA (service-oriented architectures) and determine how well certain business processes are being conducted over the network, he adds. “The idea of aggregating and correlating security and application events in the network, and then feeding them to an application, starts to allow people to look at the network not so much just as transport but now providing real business value.”

As an extra bonus, Ruh suggests, a company might add Cisco’s unified messaging, presence and mobility components to locate its chief of security or head of HR and notify them of a particular risk or governance issue.

Ruh notes that Cisco’s agreement with SAP is a “fundamental shift away from application optimization.” Fabbi says it makes no sense to seperate AON from the broader view of application acceleration and integration. “Ultimately you deploy these (SONA) technologies to make these applications work better, for end users and between applications.”

He says Cisco is largely playing down the SAP agreement, mostly because the underlying technology has been slow to really make any difference.

“What's more, a lot of it comes down to what Cisco can do today with some degree of confidence, so they’ve targeted some specific areas that they know they can accomplish.” SAP’s GRC products may provide a starting platform for SONA, but whether it’s a good starting platform is another question, adds Dzubeck.

He adds Cisco’s approach is fundamentally flawed because it’s too specific to one application. “What you want to be is applications-dynamic. You want to have the network be adaptable to any applications no matter what they are. “If you’ve got only SAP in your entire network, you can make it work. But in reality that’s not the way it works. “You can configure a set of rules, but those rules cannot be specific to one application. They should be specific to all applications.”

In the beginning, SONA was designed as an umbrella architecture to add services that will impact how applications work, says Fabbi. But overall, Cisco’s progress on a lot of these new, advanced technologies has been really disappointing.

The two core components of SONA: AON and ACE (Application Control Engine) have turned out to be underachievers, according to the analyst. Fabbi says AON remains largely a beta-based product after 18 months in the market, while ACE isn’t nearly as feature-rich as it needs to be.

Fabbi says the SAP partnership does make sense for Cisco in the longer term, but the agreement really has to be the first of many steps if the networking company is going to be credible in the application market. He says he’s confident Cisco will eventually get there, but Fabbi is unimpressed by Cisco’s short-term product execution.

“What we haven’t seen from Cisco is a really clear strategy of where they want to take this (SONA), and they haven’t shown the ability to execute along that path yet.” Cisco will have to elevate its game if it wants to become more relevant to business decision makers, he adds. “Cisco has to be seen as one of the major influences in IT decisions — not just network decisions, but ultimately the broader, more business-relevant decisions,” says Fabbi.

“When you look at what Cisco is attempting to become, it’s really to elevate their influence in the customer base. That’s what makes SONA and the underlying technology so important for Cisco.”

Source: IT World Canada