Cisco Systems unveiled a new integrated security product shortly after the company"s CEO, John Chambers, delivered the opening keynote address for Interop.

In his opening keynote, Chambers said that innovation was returning and will have benefits beyond new technology products. "Innovation is back, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of creating better productivity," he told the Interop crowd. "While technology is very exciting to us in the technology industry, it is the practical application of this technology that will impact productivity," he said. Chambers said businesses now understand that an investment in their networks can pave the way to productivity.

One way productivity will be affected by technology will be through the growth of interactive transactions, Chambers said. "Everyone, be it Wal-Mart or any other company, is looking for new ways to touch the customer," he said, adding that to do that, companies will have to invest in new technologies, such as wireless.

Security was another key point of Chamber"s presentation. Cisco"s research indicates security is the top issue on the mind of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs. Security must be pervasive across all layers of the network, Chambers said.

Chambers then demonstrated Cisco"s new ASA (Adaptive Security Architecture) 500 line of products, a family of multifunction security appliances designed to stop attacks before they spread through the network. The new products are a key component of the recently announced Adaptive Threat Defense phase of the Cisco SDN (Self-Defending Network) security strategy.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series controls network and application traffic, delivers flexible VPN connectivity, and is designed to reduce overall deployment costs, operations costs, and complexity. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series includes the Cisco ASA 5510, Cisco ASA 5520, and Cisco ASA 5540 products. This appliance family is designed to span business sizes from small and medium sized to large enterprises, and is built purposely for concurrent services scalability and unified management.

"We put a lot of different capabilities in the product to allow it to run multiple processes and to have enough storage and memory to perform all the functions we have built into it," said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco"s security and technology group. Among the security functions integrated in the product are virtual private networks, firewalls, intrusion prevention, and VoIP. "We have received a lot of input from customers that they would like to make the deployment easier and therefore cut costs," Chambers said in his keynote speech.

In his keynote, Chambers demonstrated how the new ASA 5500 series could affect branch offices, medium-size businesses, and large enterprises by reducing the number of security products and appliances required for various environments.

For analysts, the integration of various security devices makes sense. "The traditional deployment of security services results in product "silos" and forces organizations to trade off between operational efficiency and holistic security," said Joel Conover, principal analyst at Current Analysis.

"The integration of multiple technologies in the ASA 5500 solves the problem of multi-device security management, and makes it operationally and economically feasible to deploy comprehensive security services to more network locations," Conover said.

Cisco is not the only networking company involved in building integrated security products. 3Com recently acquired TippingPoint, an intrusion detection vendor, to develop an integrated security portfolio.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series is available now. The branch office system, the ASA 5510, starts at US$3,495. The small and medium-business-oriented ASA 5520 starts at $7,995. The enterprise version, the ASA 5540, begins at $16,995.