When responsibility for a company’s long-term growth and differentiation in the market is part of your job description, it can be an adventure. Nathan Jokel, senior vice president of corporate strategy and alliances at Cisco, has stepped up to the challenge.
“I support our executive leadership team, and I work very closely with the general managers that lead all of our business units and functional leaders to help make the strategic decisions and chart Cisco’s course to make sure that we’re delivering value to our customers and helping solve the problems that our customers face every day,” Jokel said.
His role requires anticipating future trends, understanding customer needs, knowing what Cisco’s competitors are doing, and sharing that insight with key decision makers at Cisco.
Jokel talked with Network World about three key technological trends Cisco’s is actively pursuing: the rise of agentic AI, preparing for the quantum era in networking and security, and addressing the growing demand for sustainable and efficient infrastructure.
AGNTCY and agentic AI
“We think that the promise of agentic is really powerful in terms of human engineers and agents working side by side with AI engineers and agents,” Jokel said. “Cisco has a view that the world of agentic AI is actually going to be multivendor. We’re going to have different technology providers that each have their own set of agents, and ultimately, they will have to interoperate. They have to talk to each other.”
With that in mind, Cisco recently announced an industry consortium called AGNTCY (pronounced “agency”) that it’s launching in partnership with LangChain, which brings agent orchestration technology, and Galileo, which adds security and observability capabilities.
AGNTCY plans to define specifications and reference implementations for an architecture built on open-source code that tackles the requirements for sourcing, creating, scaling, and optimizing agentic workflows. Ultimately, the idea is to build a trustworthy AI ecosystem to ensure agents perform reliably across diverse environments.
AGNTCY is also the underpinning of Cisco’s “Internet of Agents” vision.
When AI agents begin to proliferate, a new, open structure will be needed so they can securely communicate and collaborate together to solve complex problems, Cisco explained. Cisco’s Internet of Agents describes standards-based, shared infrastructure components and an open-sourced, three-layer architecture that would enable quantum-safe, agent-to-agent communication.
“Who better than the company that first invented the protocols that ran the Internet to help to find the protocols that run the Internet of Agents,” Jokel said.
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Nathan Jokel, senior vice president of corporate strategy and alliances at Cisco
Cisco
Quantum on the horizon
Cisco is also focused on developing technology around the networking and security aspects of quantum computing, Jokel said.
“Depending on who you talk to, quantum is anywhere from three to five to ten years out, but we need to look at things like quantum key cryptography for the day when traditional cryptography no longer works because we have sufficiently powerful quantum computers that can just crack it in seconds,” Jokel said. “We also need to look at how we network together quantum computers.”
Cisco’s focus so far has been the development of future technologies for the quantum data center, Jokel noted.
At the vendor’s Quantum Summit in October, Cisco said the quantum data center that it envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols.
“It is well known in academic research that quantum computing cannot become useful by monolithically scaling it to 10s of millions of qubits—that is not practical,” said Reza Nejabati, head of quantum research at Cisco’s advanced development group Outshift, in a presentation at the event.
“It seems, at least with the current technology, it is more realistic to build a network of smaller quantum computers. And essentially you develop the notion of the data center—that is, we build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base. That’s the basic definition of a quantum data center,” Nejabati said.
Sustainability goals drive demand for turnkey infrastructure
Another major investment area Jokel talked about is building sustainable and efficient infrastructure.
The degree that customers and the industry focus on sustainability can fluctuate, but the relentless increase in technology’s power consumption is an undeniable reality, Jokel said. “We have seen the emergence of hyperscalers building modular nuclear reactors beside their data centers to meet the energy demands of AI, which underscores the scale of this challenge,” Jokel said.
Building power-efficient systems is imperative to maximize resources and ensure we can meet ongoing technology demands, Jokel said.
Cisco has identified a number of data center power challenges on its radar. For example, integrating small-form-factor GPUs into data center infrastructure is a concern from both a power and cooling perspective and may require modifications such as the adoption of liquid cooling and adjustments to power capacity, Cisco stated.
“Cooling and liquid cooling have become strategically very important for the data center,” Jokel said.
“Our strategy is to partner with a number of vendors that specialize in liquid cooling for the data center,” he said. “We know that, increasingly, enterprises are going to need to deploy this technology, but they don’t necessarily have the expertise or the facilities to make it happen. So, our goal is to make it as turnkey as possible for the enterprise customer.”
AI-driven connectivity
At the heart of Cisco’s strategy is the promise to securely connect everything and to make anything possible, Jokel said.
“What that really means is it’s about helping our customers connect and protect their environment. So, think about connecting people, places, things, apps, data, basically anywhere the network can reach,” Jokel said. “Many of our customers may know us as a networking security company delivering firewalls. We’ve really taken the concept of connecting far beyond that, with our acquisition of Splunk, for example, and doubling down on our core security and observability capabilities.”
“What we focus on in our strategy is really three key outcomes: AI ready data centers, future-proof workplaces, and digital resilience, all powered and accelerated by Cisco AI technology,” Jokel said.
Cisco aims to deliver the full-stack infrastructure solutions that customers need, whether that’s to run AI workloads or traditional workloads, Jokel said.
“This is our servers, our switches, silicon optics, all the full-stack things we’re delivering together with our partners like Nvidia. It’s the simplicity of operations that helps our customers manage all this, which we know is a huge challenge and a pain point for them, and we think a differentiator for us,” Jokel said. “For example, we’re able to have consistent management across both the front end and back end of AI networks.”
A good example of this strategy is the recent Cisco N9300 Smart Switch series announcement.
The N9300 is built on the vendor’s 4.8T capacity Silicon One chip and includes built-in programmable data processing units (DPU) from AMD to offload complex data processing work and free up the switches for AI and large workload processing. The DPU acceleration technology unlocks a variety of network and security services such as stateful segmentation, large-scale NAT, IPsec encryption, IDS/IPS, event-based telemetry, and DDoS protection.
“We think this is an entirely new category of switch which is going to enable a set of applications, the first of which is Cisco Hypershield, which lets every single switch in the network becomes a policy enforcement point. We think that is pretty unique,” Jokel said.
Hypershield uses AI to dynamically refine security policies based on application identity and behavior. It automates policy creation, optimization, and enforcement across workloads. In addition, Cisco’s AI Defense package offers protection to enterprise customers developing AI applications across models and cloud services.
In addition, it remains a priority for Cisco to help customers stay productive and help the workforce be effective, regardless of whether they’re physically located in a corporate office, a home office, a factory floor or coffee shop, Jokel said. “That is our core set of secure connectivity technologies for the campus and branch. It’s our whole suite of collaboration devices and software that help our customers work together securely.”
On the data front, Cisco sees its data as a competitive differentiator in the world of AI.
Data is what makes AI useful and powerful, and everyone has access to the same set of foundation models and the same set of tools, Jokel said. “But Cisco’s unique spin on data is bringing our expertise in networking and security.”
For example, there are 30 million Cisco networking devices that connect more than 1 billion endpoints, Jokel said. “We see all that traffic. We observe 625 billion security events every day. [We’re] able to take that data, bring it into our powerful platform with Splunk, use that to fine-tune AI models, and bring that into our own solutions” to keep networks resilient, deliver reliable results, and stop security threats, he said.
In the big picture, it is “really about building AI capabilities across our entire software portfolio – from collaboration, observability, security, network software – to help our customers be more effective and productive in their roles,” Jokel said. “And we’re wrapping all of this with our unified Cisco AI assistant that allows an intuitive, natural-language interface to our entire software portfolio. So, you don’t have to be an expert in a particular command line interface or scripting language, you can just be effective and productive and really automate routine or mundane tasks.”
Source:: Network World