Cisco has rolled out a comprehensive series of hardware upgrades designed to facilitate enterprise AI adoption. The upgrades, announced at the company’s annual Cisco Live conference in San Diego, include retooled networking components, a unified network management platform, and the Deep Network Model domain-specific large language model. This large language model will power an AI assistant, according to Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer.
The need for these upgrades stems from the explosive growth in network traffic driven by AI, which is overwhelming IT teams with complexity and novel security risks. “As AI transforms work, it fuels explosive traffic growth across campus, branch and industrial networks,” Patel explained. Matt Eastwood, IDC SVP of enterprise infrastructure, noted that existing enterprise networks are ill-equipped to handle AI’s scale, security, and reliability requirements.
Cisco is betting on a hybrid approach to AI adoption, where enterprises use secure networks to connect AI models to their data. This strategy is gaining traction, as evidenced by Cisco surpassing its $1 billion goal in hyperscaler AI networking gear orders in its third quarter. The company’s revenue increased 11% to $14.1 billion, with networking revenue growing 8% year over year, driven by double-digit growth in switches and enterprise routing equipment.
The company has also strengthened its alliance with Nvidia, collaborating on an integrated architecture for AI-ready enterprise data center networks. Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU is now available in Cisco servers. Cisco is designing its networking gear with a growing class of agentic tools in mind, which will require fundamentally rethinking infrastructure, safety, and security.
Enterprises are eager to bolster their on-site infrastructure for AI. A recent survey commissioned by Cisco found that nearly 9 in 10 organizations plan to expand their compute capacity to run AI workloads. The importance of getting this infrastructure right is underscored by the fact that over three-quarters of respondents had experienced a major network outage due to congestion, cyberattack, or misconfiguration. “The consequence of us not getting this infrastructure piece right is pretty profound,” Patel warned, emphasizing the need for infrastructure that is seamless and unobtrusive.
