Cisco has kicked off its Cisco LIVE 2024 event with new AI-powered innovations and investments that deliver a clear message: AI isn’t just the latest turning point in technology. It’s an efficient, intelligent source of digital resilience that can connect and protect entire organisations and power growth, scale, and an inclusive future for all.
The company is launching AI-enriched networking, security, and observability solutions across its portfolio. These are designed to give customers the visibility and insights they need to connect and protect their digital footprint and build digital resilience.
“We’re thrilled to share incredible innovation and new AI-powered capabilities for our customers this week at Cisco Live,” says Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO of Cisco. “Cisco is uniquely positioned to revolutionise the way infrastructure and data connect and protect organisations of all sizes, and we are confident we are the right strategic partner for our customers in this era of AI.”
Cisco Investments also announced a $1-billion global investment fund to expand and develop secure and reliable AI solutions. Cisco is making strategic investments in Cohere, Mistral AI, and Sale AI that will advance several critical areas including customer readiness, compute infrastructure, foundational models, model development, and training.
AI and Networking
* Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters: This breakthrough AI cluster solution with Nvidia features a single place to design, deploy, monitor and assure AI pods and data centre workloads. It guides users from design, to validated deployment, to monitoring and assurance for enterprise-ready AI infrastructure.
* Cisco Networking Cloud: New AI-native Digital Experience Assurance innovations from Cisco ThousandEyes unlock cross-domain assurance for Cisco Networking Cloud and beyond. Customers are now empowered to see and manage every enterprise, cloud, SaaS, and Internet network for exceptional digital experiences to every user, everywhere, every time.
AI and Security
* In an increasingly complex and hyper-distributed world, Cisco tips the balance of power in favor of the defenders with new capabilities across the Cisco Security Cloud. Customers gain an AI-fortified security posture backed by market-leading firewall infrastructure, new sources of telemetry, superior network visibility, and AI-native management architecture.
* A little over one month after the launch of Cisco Hypershield, Cisco is announcing Cisco Hypershield support for AMD Pensando DPUs and Intel IPUs. It enables enterprises to realise an AI-driven, distributed security architecture that seamlessly goes from the cloud to the data centers to the edge while still being highly performing and energy efficient.
AI and Observability
* Customers benefit from Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk with flawless, secure digital experiences powered by unparalleled visibility and real-time insights that help standardise the observability practice – getting customers ahead of future demands and set up for new opportunities.
* At the event, Cisco will share that it has combined the power of the Splunk platform with Cisco AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with the introduction of Splunk Log Observer for Cisco AppDynamics. This integration will enable users to drive faster troubleshooting across on-prem and hybrid environments. Cisco is announcing its AI assistant for Cisco AppDynamics to empower users to unlock meaningful guidance and insights to make informed decisions faster and more accurately than ever.
The Future of Work
* AI-Powered Contact Centre and Hybrid Work Innovations: New capabilities in Webex Contact Center will help organisations design and manage conversational self-service experiences, provide an AI Assistant for contact center agents, and integrate third-party virtual agent solutions.
* Additionally, AI Assistant for Webex Suite will soon be generally available to customers. IT admins will benefit from remote device access management in Webex Control Hub, and allnew Desk Reservation with Cisco Spaces makes it easy to find and book desk spaces and Cisco Collaboration Devices.
Enabling AI Skills
* New AI Fundamentals for Partners: Cisco will announce the first stage of its AI partner specialisation training that will equip partners with the knowledge needed to optimise infrastructure for AI workloads using Cisco technology. It will explore AI basics, including key concepts and terms, a taxonomy of AI solutions and an overview of Cisco’s AI strategy, governance and use cases to master AI solution implementation in, on and through Cisco platforms.
* New Cisco Certification in AI: Organisations can build an AI-ready workforce with the announcement of Cisco’s new certification in designing modern AI architecture. The vendor-agnostic certification will enable employers, employees and jobseekers to gain and validate the skills needed to design modern AI/ML compute and networks now and into the future.