Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Technology Officer Charles Giancarlo was on hand for this week"s launch of the company"s Application Oriented Networking (AON) technology. Giancarlo, who attended the Cisco Networkers event in Las Vegas, talked about what AON is supposed to do and discussed Cisco"s plans for data center products with Computerworld"s Matt Hamblen.

I"m hearing some analysts and customers call AON an XML parsing engine, but it"s more, correct? People are still trying to figure out exactly where this AON fits. [Would-be users] haven"t yet gotten to the point of how is this going to transform business or industry and how does this work. People are still learning. Is it an XML engine only? No.

Yes, XML will be the IP of the message world, but today the world is largely non-XML. AON really operates very well in the many-protocol world.

Cisco is going to use an AON engine. We are going to front-end all of our systems with AON to go out and communicate with customers and partners and suppliers. That"s happening in the next few months, and it may take a couple of years before it"s our only interface. It means our native system can speak in its native language and our customers" systems can speak in their native languages. And instead of both sides having to have the same language in every case, AON does the universal translation and policy enforcement. That allows the systems to evolve independently.

Network engineers at the Cisco Networkers event told me they want more simplicity with networking technology. What is Cisco doing to address the simplicity concern? It"s a good question. There are many different aspects to simplicity, just like security. One thing is to make technology easier for the end users of the systems, not just the IT manager. And there are the application [developers and managers], and AON will make their lives easier. AON won"t make the network guys" lives easier, because it means another thing for the network guys to deal with. We"re focusing on making end users" use of conference tools easier, and that again makes more work for the IT guys.

But we also have a responsibility to reduce complexity for IT guys. There"s a balance there. In many ways, part of the reason IT has moved to IP so much is to add flexibility. But because we are flexible, that adds complexity to the system. Complexity is also created by just having lots of different boxes and capabilities. We think as we do a better job of integrating capabilities, we can create some level of simplicity.

But engineers, like all of us, just have to face the fact our world is getting more complex, too? We are. But I think we have to deal with complexity. Our effort to integrate wired and wireless is an effort at simplicity, by allowing the same policies to be used by users whether they are connected wirelessly or with a wired network. So I tend to think that what happens is all the new capabilities add complexity, but customers don"t tend to always notice when all the stuff that used to be complex years ago became part of the infrastructure and less complex.

Speaking of integrating capabilities, Cisco is talking an emerging market for putting functions of the data center computer components into its switches, right? Yes, we"ve been working on it some time, and it includes the purchase of TopSpin, which has a switch today which is InfiniBand. But we believe even Ethernet can head in this direction of providing very high-bandwidth, low-latency connections between actual processors and memory within the computer itself. And so the computer would get a very different definition. We"re used to thinking about a computer being an individual box, and now a computer can be defined as any arbitrary combination of boxes and processors together that can be defined effectively on the fly as demand warrants.