But a big share of attention at the three-day analyst event, being held in Santa Clara, Calif., may be on security in light of the well-publicized attempts in July by Cisco to quash a Black Hat presentation on ways to exploit the company's router IOS vulnerabilities (see "Furor over Cisco IOS router exploit erupts at Black Hat").

"The key question is, what is Cisco doing to make it easier to patch [IOS]," said John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., last week. "We know they have stepped up their use of software-vulnerability testing tools to find holes in IOS, but it still appears to be outside security analysts who are finding the holes. So what is Cisco doing to get ahead of that curve?"

Pescatore said a comprehensive patch announced last month by Cisco -- and earlier patches from the company -- are difficult to deploy because they require an IT manager to turn off a device, load a new image and restart. Worse, he said, there are dozens of versions of IOS in use at most large companies, requiring managers to shut down the network and configure each device individually, something Pescatore called a "big problem."

Another analyst, Deb Mielke of Treillage Network Strategies Inc. in McKinney, Texas, said Cisco, like Microsoft Corp., has become a target of hackers. "Hackers love to bring the big guys to their knees," she said. But Mielke said Cisco's technology is not inherently more easily breached than that of any other supplier.

Tomorrow, Chambers is expected to announce a new advanced technology, this time in the area of application services, according to people with knowledge of the conference who asked not to be named.