Networking behemoth Cisco touted on Tuesday new releases for the data center that focus on a growing enterprise appetite for artificial intelligence and security.
At Cisco Live in San Diego, the company introduced new hardware and tools promising to “future-proof” data centers for AI workloads, along with several new partnerships with neocloud providers, which offer global GPU-as-a-service and IaaS options.
Utilizing its own agentic AI offering, Cisco unveiled a multi-agentic framework for service providers to take advantage of Cisco’s AI Assistant, allowing them to mix agentic offerings from Cisco with their own agent tools.
During a keynote on Tuesday, Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, said the company’s data center offerings reflect the rapid pace of technology innovation. “We are experiencing one of the largest expansions of data centers in human history right now,” he said. “It’s a phenomenal exponential curve that’s only getting faster every single day.”
As proof of demand, the company noted that hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders have blown past Cisco’s 2025 target of $1 billion — a quarter ahead of schedule.
Zeus Kerravala, analyst and founder of ZK Research, said Cisco’s data center releases bolster the company’s market leader position in the race to adopt AI throughout the enterprise.
“No one kind of does ‘bigger and better’ better than Cisco,” he said. “They have the scale … and I think what you’re seeing is while AI started off as a purview of the hyperscalers and a few large enterprises, now it’s gone mainstream. These innovations are really around trying to simplify that deployment of AI.”
Will Townsend, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, described Cisco’s data center upgrades as “substantial.”
“I liken a complete modern infrastructure stack to a three-legged stool — providing the requisite compute, networking, and security functionality,” he said in an email interview. “From my perspective, Cisco’s announcements address all three elements to help enterprises unlock the transformative potential of generative and agentic AI applications and workloads at scale.”
Hardware and management tools
The company detailed a new unified dashboard, expanded AI point-of-delivery products (Pods) and introduced new optics for network transitions.
Cisco said the Unified Nexus Dashboard enables customers to simplify network operations by consolidating services across LAN, SAN, IP Fabric for Media Solutions and AI/ML fabrics. These capabilities will be available with the next Nexus Dashboard release in July.
Intelligent Packet Flow, a tool that allows users to steer traffic with real-time telemetry and congestion awareness across AI data management and development, is available Tuesday. The tool gives customers increased visibility across networks, GPUs and distributed AI workloads, and will pair with Cisco’s AI Assistant. AI Assistant will be introduced in the Nexus Dashboard in the upcoming year.
Cisco is also expanding its AI Pods, an AI inferencing package, with help from Nvidia. Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 can now be ordered, along with Cisco’s UCS C845A M8 servers.
The expanded AI Pod offerings “support edge, RAG, training, and large-scale inferencing at lower total cost of ownership and provide greater control and include Nvidia accelerated computing, networking and AI software,” said Kevin Wollenweber, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s networking, data center and provider connectivity, in a blog post this week.
AI agents report for duty
Cisco’s agentic AI framework will arm its Crosswork Network Automation platform with new AI capabilities and will be fully integrated with Cisco AI Assistant, enabling Cisco and customer agents to work together, according to the company.
Inter-agent operations will become a larger piece of enterprise roadmaps as agentic AI takes hold. In a recent research report, Cisco said agentic AI could handle 68% of customer service and support interactions by 2028.
Companies are racing to find a way to use agentic AI, but Kerravala said it might take time to see those efforts materialize and offer returns on investment.
“I’m curious to see how agentic AI will be adopted,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a ‘crawl, walk, run’ thing happening where businesses will use it to plan to automate more of their capabilities, but they are going to keep a human in the loop for a while.”
Neocloud partnership expansion
Cisco also said it has formed strategic partnerships to support the neocloud market.
The partnerships include Humain, Saudi Arabia’s push to build AI factories, and will use Cisco Nexus, Unified Computing System, Hypershield and Splunk products; G42, a UAE-based global technology group working to advance AI in private and public sectors; and Stargate UAE, a group of preferring technology partners that includes Cisco to bolster AI infrastructure in the Middle East.
Kerravala said the partnerships might be focused on specific geographic locations, but the outcomes will benefit the global IT ecosystem.
“Customers do want options on how and where to buy,” he said. “Being able to buy these things as a service is more palatable for a lot of organizations. I do expect, like in the UAE and those initiatives, governments will likely offer those services to businesses at or below cost to help drive the adoption of AI. It just creates more options.”
Source: https://www.techtarget.com/
