Cisco and Oracle Ink Network Traffic Management Deal.

Cisco Systems Inc has reached an agreement with Oracle Corporation that will see the two companies integrating elements of Cisco's management tools with Oracle's business software. Combining Oracle's business software with Cisco's recently released QoS Policy Manager, the latest addition to the CiscoAssure product line, will allow network administrators to prioritize certain types of data transfer (emails or reports) according to pre-established policies, the companies said. Cisco announced a similar partnership with PeopleSoft earlier this month in which the two companies said they had worked together to set policy templates, implementation guidelines and test reports for customers to help them deploy CiscoAssure services on their PeopleSoft systems. The partnerships are part of Cisco's drive to extend its influence beyond networking equipment and its associated software. The company has also recently made key investments in e-commerce front-end application companies, Open Market and InterWorld, to cement agreements tying their software more closely to Cisco's networks. The idea behind these strategic agreements is "application-aware networking", said Wim Elfrink, Cisco's vice president of customer advocacy. In other words, the idea is to develop networks that communicate with the applications that transfer data across them. Analysts said the agreements are about establishing a standard in the industry while Cisco's competitors, such 3Com and Nortel Networks, are still scrambling to come up with a competitor to QoS Policy Manager. SAP and Baan are thought to be among a number of application vendors with which Cisco is considering similar alliances.