In reply to Aldrin Isaac.

Hi Aldrin,

Great question, thank you! The key is the network's centralized location and who owns it. In the network we can see all traffic, and the network is going to be an IT controlled asset (whether through an MSP or in-house).

1) Keep in mind AVC does more than identify applications running on workstations. The network can identify and
respond to applications by applying Quality of Service or even re-routing to a different WAN or internet provider. We can do this at the branch with the ISR, the datacenter or large branch with the ASR, and in private or public cloud environments with the CSR (Cloud Services Router).

2) In a BYOD environment, IT departments can lose control over the images on devices, especially mobile devices. In fact this is becoming the status quo. The network sees all traffic, and branch and aggregation routers are centralized and represent a good place to take action.

Personally, I think that the future of routing is end user and application focused. Cisco has invested in identifying and controlling applications in the router (and WLC, by the way), which was only possible in the past with expensive probes, making it effectively impossible to address application/user experience concerns at the branch without either a bandwidth upgrade, firewall change or other time consuming tasks.