But Gleichauf's comment may also be an indication that Cisco , which has been a tough sell with enterprises largely because of the cost of upgrading Cisco and non-Cisco networking infrastructure in order to take advantage of the access control features.

While the company has found plenty of buyers for its NAC appliance, formerly known as "Clean Access," it has had far few takers for the full fledged NAC solution. In the meantime, the company has found competition from a wide range of niche NAC vendors, security mainstays like Symantec as well as Microsoft, Juniper and the Trusted Computing Group's standards based Trusted Network Connect architecture.

Gleichauf acknowledged that his company hadn't executed well in selling NAC to partners, but said the solution was for Cisco to close the loop even tighter on which firms it will tap to be a part of its solution.

"With NAC we got caught in the vendor program race with TNC and Microsoft, where you want to get as many vendors as possible. But there are only a minority of vendors who are value added. The majority of them are just looking for stickers to put on their booth," he said.

Going forward with its data leakage solution, Cisco will rely on a small number of main vendors that offer it more value with license arrangements, rather than rely on open standards, Gleichauf said.