(acronym)

AON = "Application Oriented Networking"

usage: circa 2005 ("Cisco's Application-Oriented Networking effort was just launched in June 2005."

further info: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6455/index.html

Marketing Spin: "Simply stated, Application-Oriented Networking is a new architecture that brings the disparate worlds of applications and networks together as a holistic system. Yes, Cisco is embedding application infrastructure in the network, onto network devices, to give customers a different model for deploying distributed applications. Hopefully, this will lead to both technical and economic breakthroughs. Why are we doing this? Well, we all know the problem. For over 20 years, enterprise IT has layered in increasing complexity to meet increasingly complex and changing business needs. More and more middleware, applications, integration stacks, application servers, and now, Web services and SOA. With each maturation of technology, a lot of functions have moved away from the endpoints into the middle. But the applications themselves got smarter and more complex too. The unintended consequence of this has been increased complexity and inability to change, and way too many layers of infrastructure. Complexity hasn't been fixed, it's morphed and relocated. This needs to change. Business & IT need to take a fresh approach to avoid making the same mistakes of the past with a new generation of software. But why Cisco? We solved this exact problem 20 years ago with IP-based networking, and now Cisco is trying to solve some of the problems of application-based networking with AON. " - October 14, 2005; http://blogs.cisco.com/AON/ ; author=Sam Boonin