Aiming to guide users and industry partners, Cisco Systems plans to unveil an "advanced technology" every three to four months in the coming fiscal year.

In Cisco's vocabulary these technologies form part of a product group that has the potential to reach $1bn in annual sales, and will see a focus of the company's investments in research, acquisitions and partnerships.

Current 'advanced' technologies are home networking, optical, storage area networks, IP telephony, wireless and security.

Cisco set itself a target last year of doubling the number of product introductions to outpace the competition.

Defining the four new advanced technologies aims to "help the outside world" , Cisco chief executive John Chambers claimed in a meeting with reporters at Networkers 2005 in Las Vegas.

"The value is to our industry," he said. "Here is where we are going; here is where the industry is at."

Chambers declined to say which technologies he views as candidates for the 'advanced' label, partly because of the competition and partly because he wants to wait and see how some new products perform in the market.

The new areas will be centred around hardware for the data centre and virtualisation technologies. Convergence is another space where Chambers expects to see lots of activity.

Cisco unveiled products at the user conference around the Applications Oriented Network (AON), a form of messaging middleware. 

Although the company is bullish about the new technology, Chambers was unwilling to identify it as one of the four new advanced technologies.

"It is still architecturally too early to tell if it will have the revenue generating capability and broad acceptance with customers," he said.

"AON is an important new technology, but it is hard to predict what the total market size would be."

Cisco started its strategy of advanced technologies after the dotcom burst when the company realised that traditional routing and switching did not offer much future growth potential.

"We made a decision at the time to be more aggressive," said Chambers. "So we put a number of ideas into play to see how they would come down over the next 12-18 months. Right now the pipeline looks pretty good."

i-Kew blog: " Advanced" technologies?