The Issue:

Network vendors have, for some years, been surveying the landscape,
looking for new worlds to conquer as supplying connectivity per se has become
more and more a commodity game. First they built core network‐related
functionality, such as IP‐address assignment and DNS service, into their gear
(although many, if not most, shops still use servers for these functions). Then
they offered security functionality, first filling in gaps that server and desktop
vendors left between their own security functionality; year by year offering more
and moving gradually to supplant or compete with server and desktop security
functions. They began to offer bandwidth optimization, followed some years
later by application acceleration, most recently incarnated as the specific
acceleration for file sharing known as WAFS (wide‐area file services). They
branched into voice and video over IP, and then into collaborative applications
with voice and video built in.

Now, Cisco specifically is moving further “up the stack” and into the
realm of enterprise messaging, specifically into the business of managing XML
message traffic among nodes – not just speeding up XML traffic (which many
vendors do) through compression and the like, but actually taking on the
message routing and transformation functions of traditional messaging
middleware. Others network vendors may follow Cisco’s lead, as they often
have in the past – and some non‐network companies, like IBM and Intel, have
ventured into the converged space via acquisition of messaging appliance
companies (DataPower and Sarvega, respectively). But how should network
vendors approach this market, now that they are competing against major
software vendors and outside the traditional network space?

Clients: Read this issue Paper [1]

Non Clients: Nemertes Issue Papers are available to clients only.
If you're not a client and would like to receive a copy of the Issue Paper, please contact us [2].