The Cisco Application-Oriented Networking 8340 Series Appliance is a new deployment form factor that expands the AON product family from Cisco Systems. It is part of a new class of Cisco Application-Oriented Networking (AON) products that provide an essential point of convergence between today's intelligent networks and applications based on highly distributed, service-oriented, and traditional architectures. Cisco AON technology embeds application intelligence into the network to better meet the underlying needs of applications for real-time visibility, security, event driven messaging, optimized delivery, and other core integration and deployment services.Cisco AON 8340 Series Appliance offers the concentrated single-source performance and ease of use of a standalone appliance with the added value of being network-embedded. It offers deployment flexibility within the umbrella of a network-embedded Cisco AON solution, leverages existing Cisco AON functionality optimizing deployment for numerous applications, offers high performance augmented by custom hardware acceleration and transparent integration and management as part of the existing infrastructure.Cisco AON's state-of-the-art design incorporates hardware and software components pre-integrated into a complete subsystem that can be flexibly deployed in enterprise data centers, service provider networks, or other scenarios as an embedded network function. Included with Cisco AON are software tools for managing and provisioning Cisco AON nodes (AON Management Console), as well as for designing application policies using a library of "bladelets" that can be configured in different sequences as required. Cisco AON also includes a software development kit and API for flexible extension to any custom environment, operation, or format (AON Development Studio).