Complexity is the IT professional's constant companion. It appears in many forms and on all fronts. There is the complexity of security as organizations cope with continual and evolving threats from hackers, worms, and viruses. Scalability issues. The rising cost and complication of systems integration and management. Application interoperability issues. Performance and reliability concerns. The list goes on. These burdens not only raise operating costs, they quickly sap IT's ability to be a proactive partner of the business, being trapped instead in a discouraging cycle of having to respond to security issues, adds, moves, and changes, network performance degradations or application failures.

To reverse the trend of ever higher customization and operational costs, there is a move in the industry from vertical application deployment to a horizontal approach where a more adaptable and feature-rich network acts as the foundation for a much higher degree of integration between all elements of the infrastructure.