The Daily Network Monitor

I attended Network World in Washington D.C. last week and sat on the Network Management track industry panel. During one of the main presentations, a straw poll was taken of the audience of about 130 networking professionals about how they find out about application or IP services failures. Over 60% of the audience raised their hands when asked if the end users informed them. The response was an eye opener to a lot of people.

The days of networks as a business driver are no longer the reality. Network managers are now driven by business requirements and must ensure that the network can provide support to how rapidly the business can react and adapt to new and varying economic drivers, markets, competitors, customers and regulatory initiatives.

The network needs to be the solid foundation and you should know your networks better than your end users. The business and your livelihood depend on it.

I’ve written about this before and after reading this latest review by Denise Dubie of Network World I couldn’t resist.

If your currently a network and operations management customer of a Big 4 vendor, namely HP, BMC, CA or IBM your likely as upset as 640 of your colleagues and looking for a change in course and performance. After all, Denise stated that 40% of respondents gave the Big 4 a C grade and 30% gave the forbidden D grade. What is going on? You pay hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions and all you get is C & D grade performance, service and respect?

Denise notes a Gartner report that says, “”Continuing customer satisfaction issues, the emergence of new technology and service delivery approaches, and the rise of large technology infrastructure providers expanding their capabilities into management software all contribute to making these industry leaders vulnerable.”

For more years than we care to count at times, visionary vendors like Ipswitch and a host of other SMB management vendors have dedicated productive time and thought to designing products that are effective in resolving pain yet easy to use. For years, the Big 4 dismissed us all as point products while they continued to fatten their products with hard to use features. As markets have matured in knowledge and grown in frustration, I feel exhilarated to know that our plan to build usable products was not only the right plan – it will make a difference in thousands of networks across the globe.

Cisco over the next five years plans to radically change how it sells and delivers router and switch software, in part by making that software more virtualized and modular.

Cisco’s intention is to decouple IOS software from the hardware it sells, which could let users add enhancements such as security or VoIP more quickly, without having to reinstall IOS images on routers and switches. The vendor also plans to virtualize many of its network services and applications, which currently are tied to hardware-specific modules or appliances.

This shift would make network gear operate more like a virtualized server, running multiple operating systems and applications on top of a VMware-like layer, as opposed to a router with a closed operating system, in which applications are run on hardware-based blades and modules. Ultimately, these changes will make it less expensive to deploy and manage services that run on top of IP networks, such as security, VoIP and management features, Cisco says.

High-level details of the road map were delivered in a session at Cisco’s C-Scape analyst conference last week in San Jose by Cliff Metzler, senior vice president of the company’s Network Management Technology Group.

Read the whole story here.