Beta testers and other customers interested in Cisco Systems Inc.?s new Application-Oriented Networking technology praised its potential as a secure business-to-business application gateway useful for financial services and other companies.

Cisco CEO John Chambers introduced AON (pronounced Aye-on) to 7,000 Cisco customers at Cisco Networkers here in Las Vegas earlier this week, saying the intelligent application message routing technology will help close the gap between applications and networks. He compared the arrival of AON to when reliable dial tones on telephones appeared -- replacing the need for operators to plug in cables to complete circuits.

?We?re talking about dial tone for apps,? Chambers said.

Cisco will release several AON components before the end of the year. Among them are two blade modules, one for use in four Cisco branch routers and one for the Catalyst 6500 switch used in data centers. An AON self-contained appliance that supports existing networks running gear from other vendors, a development tool and a management console round out the offering. Pricing was not announced.

Reaction from network engineers was positive. ?AON has the potential to change the way we do networking,? said Steve Warford, a network engineer for the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. He explained that Mayo has 40,000 network nodes throughout the U.S., and the network is always blamed when users notice problems with their computers. But applications are usually responsible, he said, adding that AON could help prevent such problems by bringing applications and network infrastructure closer together.

Kevin Andree, a network engineer at Lehman Brothers Inc. in Jersey City, N.J., said his company will definitely look into AON to help with the transmission of messages via a financial services industry standard protocol known as Financial Information Exchange (FIX). Those messages can be changed into a more universal format, such as XML, which is growing in use and offers more flexibility for networks.

?That would be so much easier,? Andree said.

One of the AON beta testers, BT Radianz in New York, is working with a third-party software developer using AON to monitor, manage and report on FIX messages, said Brennan Carley, the company?s chief technology officer. BT Radianz provides a financial services network for 160 brokerages with 10,000 locations globally and has been testing AON for 18 months. Over the past three months, it has been working with software developer TransactTools Inc. in New York to build a managed service for its customers that"s based on AON, he said.

In the past, BT Radianz could provide technical information on data latency and whether bytes arrived in the correct location, but AON will help business-level officials monitor whether a single transaction got through, Carley said. ?The business person wants to know if his order got to his broker successfully,? he said.

Another AON beta tester, ManTech International Corp. in Fairfax, Va., provides network integration services to U.S. government agencies for homeland security and other purposes. ManTech has been working for three months to build a prototype combining AON with an existing ManTech application used by intelligence officials to control access to data, said ManTech President Bob Coleman. With XML parsing capabilities in AON, a company could automatically decide whether a document could be passed to a network, depending on its security clearance, he said.

AON functions are now performed by middleware sold by a variety of software vendors, but AON would lower costs because it would lessen the need for separate servers, administrators and licenses, Coleman said. He called AON ?complex technology? that will require skilled engineers for implementation but added that the investment will be worthwhile.

?There?s tremendous demand for this,? he said. ?I think this is really revolutionary technology that Cisco?s developing.?

Some smaller companies offer similar capabilities to Cisco?s AON, but none have the resources and customer base, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at The Yankee Group. Cienna Corp. in Linthicum, Md., Solace Systems Inc. in Ottawa and DataPower Technology Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., all said they can compete with AON. Cisco officials listed more than 13 software makers and other vendors Cisco will partner with to provide AON products, including IBM and SAP AG.