As for the future of NAC, Gleichauf said that Cisco is looking for ways to tie Cisco's NAC appliance, formerly known as Cisco "Clean Access," with the company's NAC "framework," a larger NAC solution, which relies on Cisco routers and switches to do policy enforcement.

"Cisco's in the process of leveraging its best of breed product, which is Cisco Clean Access, and the framework product and migrating toward an integrated solution that gives customers a lot of choices. As we do that, we're going to be continually evaluating where the focus is and how we manage the investment in terms of the engineering," Gleichauf said.

Cisco's divided appliance and framework approaches are the most pressing issue for the company, not the CTA client, said Russell Rice, director of marketing in the Security Technology Unit.

"What we want to deliver to the market is the ability to have those be tied together technologically so that they use common components. That's what we don't have in the marketplace, and that's what our customers are asking us to achieve," Rice said.

Cisco is wrestling with the uncomfortable fact that adoption of the NAC framework lags far behind use of the NAC appliance, Rice said.