Is Cisco’s Unified Edge A Step Toward Agentic AI at the Edge or Just Clever Packaging?

Cisco’s latest announcement at Partner Summit 2025 introduced Cisco Unified Edge, a converged compute platform designed to bring agentic and inferencing AI workloads closer to where data is actually generated, such as the branch, the factory, the retail floor, or the hospital wing. The idea is that instead of sending massive data streams back and forth to the data center or cloud, we can perform inference and decision-making locally for faster responses, lower bandwidth requirements, and higher resilience.

It’s an interesting, ambitious, and I think logical idea that extends Cisco’s networking footprint into edge computing and AI infrastructure, which are arguably two of the fastest-moving segments in enterprise IT.

Continue reading “Is Cisco’s Unified Edge A Step Toward Agentic AI at the Edge or Just Clever Packaging?”

The Goal of AI in ITOps is Operational Improvement

I’ve been speaking with more folks again recently about AI initiatives in their IT organizations. Most recently it was a systems team that ran the on-prem server infrastructure, Azure environment, and just recently also tasked with end-user computing.

What struck me in the conversation was how the discussion kept going back to AI. That might seem weird for me to say considering the goal was to discuss AI initiatives, but let me explain.

AI is a technology; it’s a tool. Yes, I understand that in reality AI is a complex and sophisticated family of technologies, but ultimately it’s still a tool. So unless you’re literally building models and live in academia or the world of R&D, AI is not a goal unto itself. Starting with AI was the wrong approach in the discussion with this systems team, and it’s usually the wrong approach for any team.

For most of us in our respective niche of IT operations, the goal of AI is operational improvement.

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Three Critical Questions Before You Consider AI in NetOps

A few months ago I read Kavita Ganesan’s excellent book, The Business Case for AI: A Leader’s Guide to AI Strategies, Best Practices & Real-World Applications. I highly recommend it to anyone thinking critically about implementing an AI solution in IT operations because the concepts and best practices she outlines helped me to think more practically about implementing AI solutions in IT operations.

Continue reading “Three Critical Questions Before You Consider AI in NetOps”

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