Cisco's Chief Development Officer Charles Giancarlo raised this question in a talk at the company's C-Scape analyst conference Tuesday. He said Cisco is realigning itself to squeeze new ideas out of its internal talent pool — built through 108 acquisitions since 1993, with almost half of the 10,000 employees it has acquired still on board.

To spur more internal inventiveness, Giancarlo said Cisco has reorganized how it manages and supports its Emerging Technology groups — product areas outside of Cisco's core routing and switching, and its six Advanced Technologies: enterprise IP communications, home networking, optical networking, security, storage-area networking and wireless technology.

"There was criticism in the press for some time that said Cisco couldn't innovate, and that Cisco had to buy [companies] to come up with new things," Giancarlo said.

He said he wonders what happened to all the inventive technologists Cisco acquired "who were considered very innovative, and then as soon as they became part of Cisco, couldn't invent their way out of a paper bag," according to some industry perceptions.

Cisco defines Advanced Technologies as product areas where the company expects to see $1 billion in annual sales. Emerging Technologies are defined as areas that have the potential to become $1 billion businesses.

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