James Richardson (pictured), senior vice president and CMO, Cisco Systems, will use the occasion of an upcoming adress to the Chief Marketing Officer Council, an influential group of global technology marketing executives, to talk about the need for technology marketers "to balance creativity with business accountability."

The conference theme is "Perfecting the Art; Advancing the Science," and the CMO Council's European Summit is considered a premier thought leadership and networking event for decision makers from the technology and telecom industries.

It will convene at the Conrad Hotel in London in November. The CMO Council (www.cmocouncil.org) is based in Silicon Valley and its members control more than $45 billion in annual marketing and media expenditures and represent most major global brands. It's a private, non-profit organization dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior marketing and brand decision-makers in the global technology industry.

Security officials at Cisco, in the meantime, recently released a patch to fix the Internet Operating System (IOS) problem that hit the headlines last week when researcher Mike Lynn chose to highlight an outstanting issue with IOS at the Black Hat Security Conference>

It also made the news last week for possibly contemplating the acquisition of Nokia, a rumor that some analysts say may have been deliberately planted to take the heat off Cisco's mismanagement of the Lynn affair.