With Nortel, I've tried very hard to establish a partnership for 10 years. Any time there's leadership change [such as at Nortel], it's time to review things. But I'm not overly optimistic for a partnership with Nortel.

On security vulnerabilities with Cisco IOS and other products. Security is something that will be with us for another decade and beyond. As quickly as you evolve a solution, another set of problems comes up. We made the decision as a company 10 years ago that security was an architectural play, and acquired 15 companies to handle the problem -- and have over 1,500 Cisco employees in the security area. We have begun to build self-defending networks.

Like any architecture that works end to end, there are elements you add to constantly improve, and it's a constant battle. Do we have issues we have to address with security? Yes. And we encourage security researchers. But you don't get ahead by putting [a vulnerability] on the front page of a paper, because you hurt everyone. Let us address it and find the right way to go about [fixing vulnerabilities]. We have 60 partners working on Network Access Control. You can call us the Switzerland or a leading player in this partnership.

This challenge will slow down the whole industry. Most security researchers want to help and don't intend to hurt people. We don't [want] anybody to take this tremendous asset and cause exposures, to bring down hospital networks and 911 networks.