During this year’s Cisco Live event, the networking giant made one thing clear: It wants to be the backbone of powering and securing the agentic AI era.
Cisco announced several hardware updates and product rollouts meant to support AI-powered workplaces during the event, which took place in San Diego between June 8–12, including:
- Upgrades to its Universal Zero Trust architecture that will allow it to secure agentic identities and provide “comprehensive tracking of agent actions.”
- New Silicon One-powered smart switches equipped to power “high-stakes AI applications.” The company also announced new ruggedized switches that can support autonomous mobile robots.
- An AI assistant powered by its Deep Network Model, a large language model that has been trained on Cisco’s knowledge base.
- New generations of products in the company’s hybrid mesh firewall portfolio.
- New 400G bidirectional optics that will be available later on in the year.
Leading role. During a June 5 pre-briefing, Cisco president and CPO Jeetu Patel told attendees that the industry is undergoing one of the “most consequential technology shifts in human history.” He said AI will soon be able to solve problems that were once unsolvable.
“In order to get all this to happen, the fundamental requirements around infrastructure, as well as safety and security will need to be completely rethought because the classical ways that infrastructure was handled just won’t be able to deal with the scale [and] proportion that we’re talking about,” said Patel, who joined Cisco in 2020.
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“The way that you should think about us…is like the picks and shovels company during the Gold Rush,” Patel said. “We’re the infrastructure company that powers AI during the agentic movement.”
Major moves. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of Opaque Systems, told IT Brew that Cisco’s latest string of product launches are a big deal because of its move to put “policies into the actual hardware at the edge.”
“They’re not treating security as a configuration overlay, but they’re baking it into how the network operates by shifting security to the edge [and] embedding it inside the switches, firewalls, and cloud fabric,” Fulkerson said.
Myriad360 CTO Herb Hogue said Cisco, widely known as the plumbing of the internet, is well-positioned to take on the pick-and-shovel role that Patel envisions. He added that while other companies, including CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, are making similar efforts to be at the forefront of agentic AI, their approaches aren’t quite as comprehensive as Cisco’s.
“The difference between each of those is CrowdStrike is coming at it from a security centric perspective [and] Palo Alto is coming at it from a security centric perspective, as Cisco is coming at it from a holistic and security perspective,” Hogue said.