What are Cisco's top network-management challenges?

Customers also demand a fully integrated, enterprisewide management system from Cisco, Chaffin says. Anything less requires increased time, work and expense. "They want one tool that does everything," he says. "They don't want to have to have seven tools and have all these people managing different tools, because then you get into training, upgrades, who's doing what, are they all going to come back in and be able to do the same thing. [It would be helpful] if they already have something that's enterprisewide, that's comparable to other [vendors' management systems], that they could just add into rather than saying, 'Guess what, you have to have another server, interface, someone else trained on it.'"

Cisco's Sage says such a system is unrealistic. "There's this kind of false notion that there's a centralized management system that does everything," she says. "If you look at what customers actually need, it really is specific to their domains. Things have to have the complexity managed there, as opposed to being a generalist. That's the trade-off you take."

To that end, Cisco's network management architecture begins with CiscoWorks infrastructure management as the foundation, topped by separate domain managers for data center, wireless, unified communications, multicast and security. Those domain managers then are capped by management applications for compliance and change and configuration automation and control; network application-performance analysis; and network enabled, policy-based identity.

CiscoWorks is the user interface for this architecture, Sage says. From there, users can access different tool sets to drill down into domain-specific tasks, she says.

That still leaves a couple more burning needs for Cisco users, says Glen Tindal, CTO of third-party management-software vendor Intelliden. Scalability -- being able to expand the infrastructure as customer demand dictates, is one. "It's important to make one investment, to grow on the back of that investment, and to feel comfortable that it can scale to meet demand," he says. Auditability and compliance also are needed to ensure security, consistency and the network's ability to fulfill the service-level requirements of the customer.

Cisco's been offering a compliance-management application suite called Proactive Automation of Change Execution -- or PACE -- since July 2006. Intelliden's customers, however, virtually all of whom have Cisco-based infrastructure, require even more than what the vendor offers, Tindal says.

"I can't have a situation where I have different pieces and parts, each one of those addressed either partially or not at all," Tindal says on behalf of his customers. "I have to have all of those components because it's upon those that I'm going to build my business. And where the network is my business, needless to say, it's really key, important and critical."

Perhaps this is why Chambers laments the state of Cisco network management year-in and year-out.

"Chambers is always highly critical because he's a perfectionist," Sage says of her boss's comments. "His various comments on network management stem from the fact that he really, really deeply cares about this area, and he sees it as one key that directly benefits our customers. If you were to ask him if anyone in the industry has 'nailed' network management, he would agree that they haven’t.

"I think what's a little bit unfortunate about that is that it misses some of our real network-management success stories," Sage continues. "Part of what you see is that it's very hard to stop and celebrate the success when there are new technologies around the corner. Network management never gets a break. It's tough to get those comments -- at the same time, he raised a very high bar for us."