The challenge for Cisco's partners, said Chambers, will be to make the technology relevant to their customers. He recommends partners use the technology themselves to prove the benefits, adding that merely installing the technology won't lead to productivity improvements. Helping Cisco partners go after the services market has been a focus of the conference.

"If you don't change the underlying processes you don't get the productivity improvements," said Chambers.

However, an analyst cautions the "network as the platform" future may not be here yet, and Cisco's sales job on that front is not complete. Brian Sharwood, a principal with the SeaBoard Group in Toronto, said there are a lot of strong vendors that believe intelligence lies at the edge of the network, and are making some heavy bets of their own that they're right.

"We've got desktops that are very intelligent and there's a lot of processing power in these edge pieces. They don't need the network to power that," said Sharwood. "(Cisco is) going to face a little bit of a battle with end users' edge devices. Edge devices are getting better, faster; you can build a lot of that stuff into decent edge platforms."

While a large enterprise with its own network infrastructure might have the confidence today to rely on its network as its primary application delivery platform, Sharwood said businesses that rely on service providers may not be ready to cede that level of control to external factors.