Waiting an eon for an AON.(application-oriented networking from Cisco Systems Inc.)

Things don't happen as fast in networking today as they did in the glory days. Perhaps that's because today we're dealing with reality and not hype.

There's little inertia in positioning, but a lot more in product. Take Cisco's new networking revolution: AON.

AON stands for application-oriented networking, a strategy for linking network equipment with the king of all strategic information technology trends: Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA)

Enterprises are jumping on the SOA bandwagon ... Wall Street has upgraded the whole software sector of the stock market based on SOA success ... you get the picture.

Last year John Chambers said Cisco wants to elevate the engagement with the customer, a nice way of saying it wants to talk to people important enough to sign big checks. That means getting some strategic traction, i.e., linking Cisco to the big IT trend of SOA.

At a deeper level, AON addresses a knotty problem network equipment vendors have been confronting: price commoditization. At some point, all LAN switches and routers look alike, and when that happens the guy with the smallest price tag wins.

Cisco has been warning about "cheap Asian competitors" for a couple of quarters; they did the same on their earnings call in August. Cisco hopes AON will create valuable features for both switches and routers, allowing it to sustain higher prices in the face of that Asian peril.