Today's businesses are more distributed and complex than ever before, often relying on global supply chains and nearly round-the-clock communication to become more competitive, more agile, and more responsive to their customers' needs. This environment is driving an undeniable need for companies to align their business objectives with their IT strategy and resources. Web 2.0 technologies like instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and related user-driven collaborative applications are also enabling real-time interactions that span functions that were historically separate and distinct within the corporate structure. And customers are getting used to instant responsiveness. A company that can't respond quickly will be overlooked as customers takes their business to a company that can.

But how do IT decision makers go about aligning business and technology? The answer lies in the most vital element connecting any distributed business: the network. The "network" — the combination of enterprise networks, WANs, and the Internet - has effected major changes in business, from online ordering, support, and other self-service options that more quickly meet customers' needs, to employees organizing their activities online. But the biggest challenge is moving from online transactions to facilitating interactions, capturing those interactions, and driving them across the business to enhance competitiveness.

The Network's Importance in Delivering Services

To truly progress from transactions to interactions, CIOs, infrastructure architects, and their business-focused counterparts (including the CEO) must adopt a holistic view of, and comprehensive approach to, the entire IT system. Focusing on services is a much different approach from one that focuses on separate products designed to address a single requirement (such as security) or business function (such as accounting) within the enterprise. Additionally, the ubiquity of the network, paired with its increased intelligence, provides a more cost-effective means for businesses to adapt to changing customer requirements and business needs.

The network has evolved considerably over the past 20 years, and it now possesses many characteristics that make it one of the keystones to a successful next-generation, services-oriented IT architecture.

The Network Is Pervasive. It is the only element that touches every aspect of IT operations, no matter how remote or distributed. This makes it the ideal location to host infrastructure services that can be applied uniformly and consistently everywhere.

The Network Is Transparent. Network-based services can be applied neutrally and noninvasively to any part of the data center landscape without introducing a proprietary agenda or costly integration overhead. The network is application, platform, database, storage, and OS independent.

The Network Promotes Standards. The network provides wide interoperability, lower unit costs, and a low barrier to adoption. TCP/IP and Ethernet are implemented on almost every connected device in the world, allowing businesses to use their existing resources with minimal overhead.

The Network Provides Scale. The very nature of the network allows it to scale seamlessly from one to millions of nodes with minimal impact on overhead or management, while facilitating central control and enforcement of policy over a widely distributed, heterogeneous IT landscape.

The Network Foundation Is Already in Place. By adding infrastructure services to the existing network, those services immediately become available across the entire enterprise, avoiding the "silo effect" and constraint of point solutions. IT departments can deploy new infrastructure services at their own pace, using familiar paradigms and skills while avoiding the cost and risk of a major architectural change.

Given these qualities, IT architects must consider the network at the beginning of any design plans for building a service-oriented IT infrastructure. The next step is building the network in such a way that these qualities are exploited to their best advantage.

What Is a Service-Oriented Network?
Cisco's term for its approach to next-generation networks is SONA (service-oriented network architecture). Broadly stated, SONA is a framework for how organizations can connect network-based services to applications in order to more effectively address business needs. Within this model, Cisco believes that networks supporting the shift from transactions to interactions should be built in three operational layers.

The top layer is the application layer, which includes business and collaboration applications, consisting of a set of network-embedded technologies that improve the deployment of distributed and centralized applications. Application delivery services scale applications by offloading processing tasks from the application servers to purpose-built hardware and software devices. These devices are integrated into the network infrastructure and optimize communications between the client, servers, and the application.

The bottom layer is the network systems layer. Traditionally, this layer has provided connectivity to desktop clients, servers, and storage devices, as well as links to different parts of the network, including campus, data center, and distributed sites such as branch locations. The objective for this layer is to provide users with a solid network foundation built on tested designs for reliable anywhere, anytime connectivity. The network systems layer represents how these resources work together to provide increased functionalities such as QoS, high availability, multicast, and intelligent routing.

Linking the network systems layer with the application layer is the integrated network services layer. This layer provides the interconnection from applications to virtualized IP-based services such as mobility, security, identity, storage, and application networking. These services are provisioned in the network, making them accessible and reusable across the enterprise architecture. They thus make the most efficient use of resources and applications and take advantage of the ubiquitous access to, and responsiveness of, the network.

While re-architecting an enterprise network may sound more than a little daunting, many service-oriented capabilities already exist in today's networks, even though many IT managers are not aware that such functions are at hand. But to gain full service-oriented capabilities, IT managers must start layering and connecting these existing functions.

Here are some examples of how a service-oriented network provides business benefits by layering functions to deliver key network services:

Wireless sensors or radio frequency identification tags can be used to track the location of people or things throughout the enterprise. These devices can then help applications such as inventory management systems do a better job.

The current orders for a large customer can be displayed in an easily changed wiki page that allows all the sales representatives calling on that customer to add their own comments about what trends and opportunities can be discerned from the customer's past orders. Product managers and developers can distill and act on this information to refine product development plans.

A large bank with multiple branch offices can use location-based services paired with unified communications systems such as VoIP and even video conferencing to locate and connect banking specialists with customers, regardless of their location.

While many of these types of capabilities can be application- or software-based, most of the functions are generic and more efficiently performed by the network, freeing applications to focus on more advanced tasks.

The Benefits of a Service-Oriented Network
Building a service-oriented network not only establishes a cost-effective, scalable foundation for the emerging collaborative nature of business interactions, it improves communications and strengthens customer loyalty. By optimizing the enterprise network, a company can accelerate business-value creation. Specifically, it can:

Increase the flexibility of internal processes
Reduce costs through standardization
Foster innovation inside and outside the company
Improve the value created by enterprise applications
Boost adoption of Web 2.0 technologies

The entire foundation of this new business model is reliable, manageable, and operationally robust dynamic services, which can be delivered only by a strategically architected network.

Using the Network's Advantages
How can an organization start to take advantage of what the network can offer? The best place for an organization to start with its service-oriented network implementation is with its most pressing business problems. For example, if an organization is having a supply-chain challenge, such as controlling access to its inventory database, the business can look to the network to offer new policy-based controls with packet routing. Once such a routing function is in place, that capability can then be reused for remote access to any of the company's other applications. Where these applications or devices reside matters little, since the network and its service capabilities are ubiquitous.

Once the business problem and solutions are identified, it is vital that the IT architects and application teams engage the network planning team into their implementation plans from the beginning of the project. Too often, an IT architecture is designed in isolation, leaving the network as an afterthought.

By using services already in the network, architects can look to the network to provide functionality such as security, which was previously thought of as being only within the network. This holistic, collaborative approach will ultimately benefit all levels of the company in addition to the IT organization by making the adoption of new technology simpler, more secure, and more scalable as the organization becomes more agile and more responsive to customer needs.