Cisco has repositioned from a legacy networking hardware maker to an AI-driven infrastructure and services vendor that helps companies build and run AI systems. The company emphasizes the critical role of global networking and cloud backbone in enabling AI at scale. Cisco focuses on managing and proactively supporting millions, potentially billions, of customer devices worldwide. The firm develops AI agents and automation to perform network tasks at machine speed while keeping IT in control. The scale and complexity of distributed infrastructure create ongoing challenges in visibility, maintenance, and coordination across hardware at customer sites.
It's the nature of the market beast -- think about all the formerly booming tech providers that have disappeared over the years, either by acquisition or collapse: Digital Equipment Corporation, Wang, Compaq, just to name a few. Yet, there are some that have evolved and adapted quite aggressively through the decades -- Microsoft from its personal computer roots to Azure and Copilot; Google from simple search engine to Google AI; Amazon from online bookseller to Amazon Web Services, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker;
I feel as though some of the backbone companies we rely on to keep the internet and cloud running -- Cisco and IBM come to mind -- have taken a backseat, at least in terms of attention, to all the razzle-dazzle of the AI age. After all, AI would be nothing more than a disconnected, dysfunctional spreadsheet without the massive, sophisticated global infrastructure needed to support it.
So when I had the opportunity to talk to Cisco Systems recently, I was more than curious about how the 40-year-old networking hardware company -- bellwether of the industry in the 1990s -- has been reinventing itself in the AI age. Ultimately, it is purposing AI to help companies build their AI systems. The company has positioned itself as an AI-driven infrastructure and services provider, especially when it comes to supporting the millions of hardware devices at customer sites across the globe,
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