Promising Network Management Research Areas: A Network Vendor's Perspective Abstract: The Cisco Network Management Research Council (NMRC) is a task force within Cisco that is organized out of the CTO office of Cisco's Network Management Technology Group. The mission of the NMRC is to facilitate interaction between Cisco product development groups and researchers outside of Cisco who investigate areas of potential interest to those development groups. This has resulted in a number of joint research projects between Cisco and research organizations, in several cases funded by Cisco's University Research Program (URP) or as Cisco Applied Research and Development (CARD) projects. As part of participating in the workshop, we would like to present an overview of research areas in network management that the NMRC has identified as particularly promising and relevant to Cisco's business. These are research areas which we believe have significant potential to address existing and/or future management needs of Cisco customers such as enterprise IT organizations and service providers. By presenting the overview, we hope to gather feedback from the research community on their perspective on those areas that we have identified, as well as contribute towards guiding the research community towards areas that promise to have substantial practical relevance and commercial impact. ============== Petre's bio (if needed at all; if too long cut it): Prof. Dr. Petre Dini [SM] (pdini@cisco.com) is now with Cisco Systems, as a senior technical leader and principal architect, being responsible for policy-based strategic architectures and protocols for network management, QoS, SLA, and performance, programmable networks and services, provisioning under QoS constraints, wireless networks and protocols, and consistent service manageability. He's applied industrial research interests include instrumentation software agents, performance, scalability, autonomic computing, wireless and mobile networks, constraints in wireless networks, adaptive networks, sensor networks, and policy-related issues in adaptable networks. Until 1990 he worked as a project director on the development of various industrial applications including CAD/CAM, nuclear plant monitoring, and real-time embedded software. From 1991 he led various Canadian projects related to object-oriented management applications for distributed systems, and to broadband services in multimedia applications, until early 1996. In 1996 he joined Computer Science Research Institute of Montreal and coordinated many projects on distributed software and management architectures. In this period he was an Adjunct Professor with McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a Canadian representative in the European projects. Since 1998 he was with AT&T Labs, as a senior technical manager, focusing on distributed QoS, SLA, and performance in content delivery services. He was the Co-Chair of Policy-Based Management Work Group in Telemanagement Forum, is a Rapporteur for ITU-T/SG4, and actively involved in IEEE industrial initiatives. He has been an invited speaker to many international conferences, a tutorial lecturer, and chaired several international conferences. He published more than 100 papers in prestigious conferences sand journals, and has more than 20 granted or pending patents. Petre received his M.Eng. from Polytechnic Institute of Timisoara, Romania, in Computer Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Montreal, Canada. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, a Senior IEEE member, and an ACM member.