Networking giant Cisco’s announcement of its new technology strategy is touching off a debate that could usher in enterprise networking’s first major upheaval since the emergence of network routing and switching 24 years ago.

One thing is clear: There is a need for a redesign of modern networking. But not everyone believes that Cisco, despite its dominance, is in a position to define how the market will adapt to a fundamental technology change.

“Cisco is highly dependent on networking revenue as the anchor point for its business and until they move away from IOS and towards a more open environment, can their network strategy be as open as they claim?” asks Wes Durow, vice president of global enterprise marketing at Nortel.

IOS is the proprietary operating software used in almost all of Cisco’s routers and switches. Cisco says its redefinition of networking does not shut out other vendors from hooking into its network-centric communications products.

Cisco on Wednesday announced a strategy in which it will embed application functions into the network in order to make enterprise communications more flexible than it is today. (see Cisco Aims at Microsoft, IBM Turf)

The emergence of social networking, software-as-a-service, mobility, VoIP, IP video, and media convergence is changing the geometry of networks. Networking is no longer the static transfer of data from point to point.

It now involves the viral spread of all forms of communication whether voice, data, or video among groups of people and also among people with similar interests among multiple companies.

“Web 2.0 is having a big impact on how consumers use the Internet but the dilemma for IT buyers is the content is not secure, so what we are doing is bringing those technologies securely into the enterprise,” said Don Proctor, Cisco’s senior vice president of the software group.

Cisco sees the adoption of social and other forms of viral networking as the core of the change that is occurring in networking and the company has carved out its role in defining and exploiting these changes.

Cisco measures the opportunity brought on by the way people communicate today at about $34 billion. Cisco highlighted three products that will be part of its assault on the new market: unified communications, telepresence, and SaaS.

But Mr. Durow believes that outside the inclusion of three existing products, Cisco’s strategy fell far short of a real definition of a new type of networking.

“We think a new type of network is required that must be resilient but must also be energy efficient because you can’t move to unified communications without looking at the energy cost of the network,” Mr. Durow said.

But Cisco, which built its strength on data networking, does not have the background in voice communications to lead the market on unified communications, he said.

“But most of all there is a dire need for open networks because the decisions are not being made at the network level, they are being made in partnership with the desktop and application decision-makers, and Cisco’s strategy does not take that into account,” Mr. Durow said.