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Cisco 'Primes' Its Borderless Networks Portfolio: Page 2 of 3

Mike Spanbauer, principal analyst, Current Analysis, sees ISE and Prime as complementary announcements. "Prime for Enterprise represents the most significant campus management investment Cisco has made internally [vs. acquisition] in years--a common architecture across the services and network elements that integrates LMS, NAM, and NCS into a single management portal on day one with additional integrations planned. The ability to integrate the management applications that Prime for Enterprise does into a single UI will reduce operation challenges and, most importantly, reduce troubleshooting/help desk issues significantly."

With ISE providing a consistent security enforcement mechanism across most endpoint device types today, IT departments can devise and deploy policies once per user, says Spanbauer. "This reduces the unique policies that must be managed and, therefore, reduces the OPEX from the past, where policies were applied on a device-by-device basis, if they even were at all."

Cisco Prime is the biggest part of the announcement, says Andre Kindness, senior analyst, Forrester Research. Outside of the data center, networking hardware has gotten stale and vendors have done a poor job moving the networking hardware beyond speeds and features. "With Cisco's investment in the Prime Strategy and supporting products [NCS, LMS, NAM and CM], they are transforming networking from the DOS world to a GUI one."

He says the company is finally recognizing that software and management tools are the key enabler to aligning networks to "cloud-like" infrastructures and business demands, reducing resource costs, assembling more reliable processes and putting the power in the hands of the user. "It is good that Cisco is combining management of devices and users, whether wired or wireless, under one umbrella. It's the right direction, but HP's ProCurve line has had that capability with ProCurve Manager and Identity Driven Manager for a few years."

While Kindness isn't sure these announcements put Cisco ahead of the competition, it does put the company back on the right track. "Other vendors like Juniper and Brocade had better systems than CiscoWorks. If Cisco continues with investment in the portfolio of management software tools and ties the silos together while delivering a great customer experience, then Cisco will be able to pull ahead from the competitors and cure customers' hangover from CiscoWorks." The TrustSec 2.0 and ISE are consistent with our view of identity-centric end-to-end security that is both needed and lacking in the enterprise today, says Kindness.