Analysts say Cisco's data center ambitions will accelerate in 2009 and underscore the company's intentions to become more of an overall IT vendor.

"Can they really make the credible transition to an IT vendor from a networking vendor?" asks Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group. "That is their absolute biggest challenge because that gets them into a whole different set of buying criteria."

Adds Rob Whiteley of Forrester Research: "The data center is probably going to be the most interesting battle ground (for Cisco). Whatever comes out in 2009 from Cisco is going to be very virtualization-centric."

Also on tap for 2009 from Cisco is a TelePresence virtual conferencing system for the home; and language translation and speech recognition for Cisco's new media processor, which debuted in early December. The home TelePresence systems will go into trials in the summer and be generally available sometime after that, says Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Emerging Technologies group.

The translation/recognition capability for the MXE 3000, which changes media formats to accommodate different devices and standards, will allow users speaking different languages to engage in videoconferencing sessions with translation.