But some other analysts said that Cisco's focus on managing applications in the network will be a challenge, especially if the company is unwilling to interoperate and partner with other vendors of management tools.

Cisco wants to become "a strategic partner [with IT managers] in optimizing application performance across the infrastructure," said Dennis Drogseth, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. "But no C-level executive in their right mind is going to look for a truly strategic answer that's embedded exclusively in a single hardware brand."