Emerging importance of e-business has led to dramatic changes in the types of traffic running over enterprise and public networks. Enterprises today are deploying  or sourcing from application service providers (ASPs) e-commerce, intranet and multimedia applications  and opening up Internet access to remote offices. The result is increasing diversity of traffic types on enterprise networks.

A recent survey by Distributed Networking Associates indicates that 48 percent of the traffic in today ’s enterprise networks is TCP/IP, representing Internet access, e-mail and other Web-based applications.  Thirteen percent of traffic is SNA,16 percent bridged Ethernet and 9 percent Novell IPX.    The remaining 14 percent of traffic is a mix of emerging applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and legacy traffic.