Taf Anthias From a nuts-and-bolts standpoint, what technology is your AON business unit producing?
Taf Anthias: It’s technology that fits inside routers and switches, and works synergistically with Layer 2 and 3 networks. But the goal is to understand the traffic that flows through the network, and what a customer is trying to do. For instance, we want the network to figure out when a purchase order is moving over the network. The network then asks, ‘What does the customer really want to do with this purchase order? What security needs to be applied to it? What kind of format should it be in?’ and is able to speak the language of the applications. You’ve said that AON represents the logical evolution of the network to improve communications. Can you elaborate on that? Anthias: The role of the network is to help things — from your desktop to your Web server or back-end apps — stay connected. We provided that basic pipe on which to exchange information. But how do we make that more valuable? So we decided to put more intelligence into the network. Everyone understands that it now ma
