"I still firmly believe that it's in IBM's best interests to work with us. That door will always be open," Chambers told the audience at the company's financial analyst conference at its headquarters in San Jose, California. The annual event covered a wide range of topics and revealed company executives' thinking on several issues.

IBM earlier this year announced a in which it will resell switches and routers from Cisco rival Juniper Networks.

Chambers and other executives spent much of the day telling financial analysts that Cisco has a window of opportunity now to become the preeminent IT and communications vendor because of the growing importance of virtualization, collaboration and video. One key move in this direction was the company's recently announced with EMC and VMware. Under a joint venture called Acadia, EMC will integrate its storage equipment and management software with Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System) architecture, with VMware contributing its virtualization software.

Because of that deal, Chambers believes Cisco can achieve a central role in the data center without making storage products itself, he said. If it could have similarly formed as strong a partnership with a computing platform vendor, Cisco would not have developed its own servers, Chambers said.

Analysts at the event said they think Chambers is sincere about his willingness to work with IBM. The two companies have much in common, such as their enterprise customer base, and Cisco's products could fit into IBM's offerings, said Mark Sue of RBC Capital Markets.