The announcement will be made at Networld + Interop in Las Vegas, following on from yesterday’s unveiling of the ASA multi-function security appliance and the new low-end models in the Integrated Service Router (ISR) family, which were announced at the beginning of the week.

The Wireless Location Appliance (WLoc) 2700 is, in truth, a re-badged version of a product that WLAN vendor Airespace was already selling when it was acquired by the Santa Jose, California-based networking giant in January.

As such, it still uses only Airespace APs for triangulation with the active RFID tag on the device to be located. Down the road, however, Cisco plans to blast the Airespace Lightweight Access Point (LWAP) image onto its own Aironet fat APs, which will enable a much larger universe of equipment to take part in triangulations, said Phil Dean, manager of applications networking at Cisco in EMEA.

The WLoc appliance has a US list price of $14,995 and will ship in June. According to Dean, it competes with proprietary solutions that aren’t based on standards like 802.11. Its main claim to fame, of course, will be the fact that companies that already have Airespace or, in the future, Cisco APs in place around their campuses will be able to sweat the assets by introducing asset tracking too.

The Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) family, meanwhile, marks Cisco’s first foray into multi-function rather than discrete appliances, offering PIX firewall, network IPS, VPN and anti-virus/anti-spam functionality, with the last of these provided by strategic Cisco partner Trend Micro.

It is designed to sell to companies with a particular preference for appliances and, given the price range of the boxes, mainly into the SME space. As Paul King, principal security consultant with Cisco in the UK and Ireland, put it, you can now get firewalling with PIX, on the ISR or in the ASA.

There are three models in the family with different throughput capabilities. The ASA 5510 handles up to 300Mbps and has a list price that starts at $3,495; the 5520 goes up to 450Mbps and starts at $7,995, while the 5540 goes up to 640Mbps and starts $16,995. All three models are available this month.

Finally there are the additions to the ISR family, the first three modular versions of which (the 1800, 2800 and 3800 series) were unveiled in September last year. The newcomers are a non-modular version of the eight-port 1800, which as well as being available in a fixed configuration for the first time, ships with dual-radio 802.11a, b and g connectivity as default from the factory.

Aimed at the SME, branch office or regional hub, the non-modular branch of the family comes in five flavours, three thus with an integrated DSL modem for SME and two with dual Ethernet ports for analog modem or ISDN backup for DSL/cable/Metro Ethernet connections.

The range starts at $1,295. As for customers already running the first generation of ISR devices, Cisco is also making available a dual-radio Wireless Interface Card, the HWIC-AP, with prices starting at $500, which can be slotted into those boxes to add the WLAN capability to them.

Also new to the family is the 800 series of four-port small office/teleworker boxes, which presently consists of two models, the 870 (starting at $649) and the 850 ($399). As for competition, Neil Walker, technical manager for advanced technologies within Cisco’s EMEA organization, argued that Cisco is doing something new with these products.

Vendors like Linksys [itself now a Cisco company] have wireless-enabled their kit, but they focus on SoHo, whereas these products are for the SMB and xSP managed services market, with features such as QoS, remote management, and VPN with up to 10 tunnels, which you won’t find on the SoHo boxes, he went on.

Furthermore, though neither the 1800 nor the 800 series feature native voice support, they can be connected to an IP PBX in a bigger organization for desk-to-desk calling, Walker added.