Cisco reveals AI innovation and partnerships

At its flagship technology event in Europe, with over 14,000 of the world’s leading IT professionals attending, Cisco has announced major momentum in Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the entire portfolio.

Few transformational technologies have generated the kind of interest as AI and, most recently, Generative AI (GenAI). Organizations around the world are finding exciting new ways to collaborate, manage applications, enhance their digital security and reimagine customer experiences. However, each of these elevate concerns over moving and accessing data, accuracy, privacy, and the ethical and responsible use of AI.

It’s estimated that GenAI could add $4.4 trillion to global GDP each year. Yet there are challenges in place around enabling companies to get there. The recent Cisco AI Readiness Index, a survey of more than 8,000 private sector, business and IT leaders across 30 countries, found that 95 percent of respondents have an AI strategy in place or under development. Yet only 14 percent are ready to integrate AI into their businesses.

“The opportunity to power progress has never been greater. In an unpredictable world, technology is at the forefront of solving whatever challenges we may face. With AI, we see infinite possibilities and a future that’s more efficient, more innovative and benefits everyone. At Cisco, we’re excited about the role we play. We have the infrastructure to power AI, the portfolio optimized to secure it, the visibility and tools to ensure the best user experience and the expertise to help our customers get the outcomes they need – in a way that no one else can.” — Oliver Tuszik, SVP & President of Europe, Middle East and Africa, Cisco.

Cisco already harnesses AI-powered capabilities across its product and customer service portfolio and is leading innovation for AI-ready infrastructure. At Cisco Live Amsterdam, to further deliver on its strategy to implement and integrate AI that supports customer outcomes, Cisco is announcing:

• Cisco and NVIDIA help enterprises quickly and easily deploy and manage secure AI infrastructure. The two companies today announced plans to deliver AI infrastructure solutions for the data center that are easy to deploy and manage, enabling the massive computing power that enterprises need to succeed in the AI era.

• Cisco Identity Intelligence defends against the most persistent cyber threats. Within the Cisco Security Cloud, there has been continued AI innovation to deliver a unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. This includes new AI-backed analytics for Cisco Identity Intelligence, as well as the recently unveiled Cisco AI Assistant for Security that helps customers make informed decisions, augment tool capabilities and automate complex tasks.

• Cisco unveiled new innovations on the Cisco Observability Platform. To empower customers with enhanced productivity as well as better visibility, insights and actions, the Cisco Observability Platform now offers a natural language interface for simplified troubleshooting. In addition, the new Cisco AIOps application now simplifies real-time business health monitoring to automate IT processes and keep operations teams productive and responsive.

• Cisco announced its first SaaS product that allows for trustworthy GenAI deployments in organizations. Announced today, Motific provides a central view across the entire GenAI journey, empowering central IT and security teams to rapidly deliver trustworthy GenAI capabilities across their organizations with control over sensitive data, security, and cost.

• Cisco accelerates customers’ adoption of AI with the right infrastructure for the right use case. The company unveiled new technologies to help businesses develop and optimize infrastructure to support AI. These include the new Cisco X-Series Direct which is designed for environments where customers need connectivity and compute power at the edge to support more applications with less infrastructure, and the expanded offering of converged and hyperconverged validated designs that build on the recently announced Cisco Validated Solutions and AI/ML blueprint for data center networks.

• Webex by Cisco announces availability of anticipated AI features. Furthering Webex by Cisco's ongoing commitment to provide robust capabilities that empower people to do their best work, the company announced the general availability and beta availability of Cisco AI Assistant features across the Webex Suite and Contact Center including Meeting and Vidcast Summaries, Change Message Tone, message translation, agent burnout detection and conversation summaries.

With differentiated AI capabilities responsibly integrated across the portfolio, Cisco is helping customers to secure their AI stack and data, manage costs and deliver trustworthy AI outcomes. More information on Cisco’s approach to AI is available on Cisco.com.

Cisco and NVIDIA

Cisco and NVIDIA have revealed plans to deliver AI infrastructure solutions for the data center that are easy to deploy and manage, enabling the massive computing power that enterprises need to succeed in the AI era.

“AI is fundamentally changing how we work and live, and history has shown that a shift of this magnitude is going to require enterprises to rethink and re-architect their infrastructures,” said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO, Cisco. “Strengthening our great partnership with NVIDIA is going to arm enterprises with the technology and the expertise they need to build, deploy, manage, and secure AI solutions at scale.”

“Companies everywhere are racing to transform their businesses with generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Working closely with Cisco, we’re making it easier than ever for enterprises to obtain the infrastructure they need to benefit from AI, the most powerful technology force of our lifetime.”

A Powerful Partnership

Cisco, with its industry-leading expertise in Ethernet networking and extensive partner ecosystem, together with NVIDIA, the inventor of the GPU that fueled the AI boom, share a vision and commitment to help customers navigate the transitions for AI with highly secure Ethernet-based infrastructure.

Cisco and NVIDIA have offered a broad range of integrated product solutions over the past several years across Webex collaboration devices and data center compute environments to enable hybrid workforces with flexible workspaces, AI-powered meetings and virtual desktop infrastructure. The companies are now deepening their partnership in the data center to enable enterprise customers with scalable and automated AI cluster management, automated troubleshooting, best-in-class customer experiences, and more. Highlights include:

Cisco and NVIDIA Integrated Data Center Solutions Available Today

• NVIDIA’s newest Tensor Core GPUs are available in Cisco’s M7 generation of UCS rack and blade servers, including Cisco UCS X-Series and UCS X-Series Direct, to enable optimal performance across a broad array of AI and data-intensive workloads in the data center and at the edge

• NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which includes software frameworks, pretrained models and development tools for more secure, stable and supported production AI is now available on Cisco’s global price list.

• Jointly validated reference architectures through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) make it simple to deploy and manage AI clusters at any scale in a wide array of use cases spanning virtualized and containerized environments, with both converged and hyperconverged options. CVDs for FlexPod and FlashStack for Generative AI Inferencing with NVAIE will be available this month, with more to follow.

• Supporting Cisco Networking Cloud: Cisco simplified AI infrastructure management and operations through both on-premises and cloud-based management with Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Cisco Intersight.

• Digital Experience Monitoring: With AI workloads and data in the public cloud, on premises and across multiple data centers, ThousandEyes provides Digital Experience Monitoring to provide AI-driven insights and automated remediation of problems that occur anywhere across the cloud to on-premises networks.

• The Cisco Observability Platform uses AI capabilities to contextualize and correlate real-time telemetry across domains, so organizations can better attain the visibility, insights and actions to improve digital experiences.

• Partners Reducing Risks: As organizations plan to successfully adopt AI and automation, they will look to Cisco’s global ecosystem of partners to advise, support and guide them.

“Building AI compute-based environments can be daunting task for organizations, and underscores the need for simple, adaptable data center infrastructure that delivers optimized performance,” said Vladimir Ester, chief technology officer and cofounder of ClusterPower. “Cisco and NVIDIA are bringing together the innovations to help enterprises support demand for more computing power in the data center and navigate the transitions for AI with secure and observable infrastructure.”

“World Wide Technology (WWT) is excited to see NVIDIA and Cisco combining resources to bring proven Ethernet-based AI solutions to market. Ethernet has the broadest scale in our client base, and this partnership and resulting offers will accelerate our ability to deliver AI solutions to our clients. Both Cisco and NVIDIA are already a significant part of WWT’s AI Proving Ground lab where we help clients select and operationalize AI architectures so they can more quickly turn their data into insights and action.”

“As enterprises look to transform their businesses with AI, they must understand the unique demands that AI workloads place on data center infrastructure, said Vijay Bhagavath, Vice President, Cloud & Data Center Networks at IDC Research. “The Cisco and NVIDIA partnership brings together two trusted brands with complementary technologies to enable customers to realize the full potential of AI with a wide range of performance-optimized Ethernet-based infrastructure. “