Cisco Borgs all its management tools into a single Cloud Control console

Not just a salve for netadmins – this is also a play to ensure Switchzilla is AI-relevant

Cisco Live There’s light at the end of the tunnel for netadmins tired of juggling multiple management consoles: Cisco announced it’s testing a tool called Cloud Control that will drive all its networking, security, and observability tools – and hopefully make the biz more relevant in the AI era.

At its Cisco Live conference in San Diego, the networking giant previewed Cloud Control and introduced AI Canvas - an agentic interface that dynamically generates management dashboards that IT pros need to handle different tasks. Cisco also announced an AI Assistant that provides a conversational interface for its products.

Both are powered by a “deep network model” the networking giant built to provide expert networking advice.

Cisco execs told The Register that Cloud Control relies on Canvas and the AI Assistant and will allow IT teams to use natural language queries to find information about the state of a network, or the reason for glitches and outages. The AI systems will draw on live and historical operational data to advise on issues, generate a UI with the controls needed to address a problem, and propose a fix that agents will then implement – after human approval.

Cisco AI Canvas - Click to enlarge

Switchzilla thinks IT departments will welcome this “agentic ops” approach, as today they struggle to collaborate when incidents occur because networking, ops, applications, and security teams each have their own domains and tools.

CEO Chuck Robbins said these technologies are needed because no organization can scale its headcount to meet security threats, so machines must scale to share the burden.

Also at Cisco Live, the tech giant announced the unification of its Catalyst and Meraki switching and wireless hardware ranges, which now share a management console and common licensing. The company additionally announced Nexus Dashboard, which offers a single console to manage NX-OS and ACI fabrics.

The keynote crowd applauded both unification announcements.

’Re-rack the entire datacenter for AI’

There's an AI tie-in here as well - Cisco thinks these unifications of previously disparate tools make its range portfolio more relevant to companies building AI applications.

Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel observed on stage that generative AI creates sporadic spikes of demand for networking and compute resources, but agentic AI creates “sustained perpetual demand for inferencing capacity” – and therefore requires more sophisticated infrastructure that will require IT teams to “re-rack the entire datacenter and rebuild the network.”

Of course he'd say that, given Cisco’s business remains grounded in selling hardware – and especially hardware running its own programmable Silicon One processors. Patel rates programmability as essential because it means Cisco can adapt its boxes for new workloads without needing to go through the lengthy process of developing new silicon. Customers therefore won’t need to buy new devices quite so often.

Patel then dismissed rival networking vendors whose appliances rely on open-source software and commodity hardware as “metalworking and sheet metal companies.”

Bragging and sniping aside, Cisco has brought Silicon One into a pair of new campus switches, the C9350 and C9610.

Those machines integrate with Hypershield, the distributed security tools Cisco introduced in 2024 that allow the deployment of lightweight firewalls that run in many locations – on switches, servers, and networking devices.

The new switches therefore reflect Cisco’s belief that networking and security must fuse to enable widespread AI adoption, because the info in AI models and the applications that use them require access to sensitive material.

Robbins observed that Cisco’s networking competitors don’t offer security tools, and its security competitors don’t offer networking tools.

Patel riffed on that with an observation that “Every technology you buy adds value by itself and compounds value,” before adding that users can only realize compound value when products work in harmony.

In other words, unifying device and service management with Cloud Control, and improving management for Nexus, Meraki, and Catalyst, will not only please long-suffering netadmins – the moves also let Cisco push its portfolio as a platform for AI that justifies datacenter rebuilds. ®