TECHnalysis Research Blogs
TECHnalysis Research president Bob O'Donnell publishes commentary on current tech industry trends every week at LinkedIn.com in the TECHnalysis Research Insights Newsletter and those blog entries are reposted here as well. In addition, those columns are also reprinted on Techspot and SeekingAlpha.

He also writes a regular column in the Tech section of USAToday.com and those columns are posted here. Some of the USAToday columns are also published on partner sites, such as MSN.

He also writes a 5G-focused column for Forbes that can be found here and that is archived here.

In addition, he also occasionally writes guest columns in various publications, including RCR Wireless, Fast Company and engadget. Those columns are reprinted here.

November 5, 2025
Cisco Brings Agents to Network Management and Compute to the Edge

By Bob O'Donnell

When it comes to AI-powered capabilities, agentic workflows and edge computing applications, a lot of promises have been made over the years. A whole lot.

In fact, these three topics have arguably dominated the headlines from tech-focused content sources and have woven their way into the announcements from most major tech vendors for a while now. So, in many ways, it wasn’t the least bit surprising to see Cisco talking up these capabilities at its recent Partner Summit event in San Diego. (As expected, the company also spent a good amount of time explaining the new partner incentive program, called Cisco 360, that’s been in the works for over a year.)

It was a bit unexpected, however, to have the company go beyond a recap of its recent product announcements and make news in several important areas. As Cisco’s Chief Product Officer, Jeetu Patel, explained, given how rapidly the world of technology has been evolving over the last year, the company is now using every event it hosts to introduce new products and services.

At its Partner Summit, Cisco took the wraps off a new AI-powered, agent-driven network management and services tool called Cisco IQ, along with an interesting new edge computing platform called the Cisco Unified Edge. The Cisco IQ announcement does have a partner tie-in, since it’s expected to be a key enabler for new services that partners can sell and an API-based platform that partners can extend to create unique services of their own.

The basic concept behind Cisco IQ is to integrate the company’s services capabilities and network monitoring and management tools with a Cisco-trained LLM that holds over four decades of network management expertise and powers a set of AI-powered digital agents. The goal is to bring a new set of capabilities and insights that make it significantly easier to assess, manage, troubleshoot, and automate the process of deploying, proactively managing, securing, and optimizing the specific combination of equipment that compromises a given enterprise’s network. Planned for a full release in the second half of 2026, Cisco IQ can be deployed as a cloud-based SaaS tool or an on-prem application in either a connected or air-gapped environment.

By integrating these tools and intelligence into a friendly UI that includes options for traditional dashboards, a chat-based window for querying the knowledge base, and generative AI-powered data analysis tools, Cisco IQ should provide practical benefits like reducing the time it takes to remediate issues, proactively scanning for potential problems and more. Ultimately, the goals are to give IT professionals time back to work on more meaningful tasks rather than fixing network issues and to ensure the reliable and secure operation of the network infrastructure.

The agentic side of Cisco IQ helps with the real-time monitoring and assessment capabilities and, importantly, sets the stage for when potential fixes can be handled automatically. Cisco made it very clear, however, that the initial plans for IQ do not include any fully autonomous agents. Given all the potential concerns that IT managers have about agents running amok—especially in the early days of the technology—Cisco wisely chose to let the agents make suggestions on recommended fixes and updates, but not do the work without user interventions and permissions. In the future, as agentic technologies evolve and mature those options could/should become available, opening the promise of a fully autonomous network.

The other interesting announcement from the partner event is an extension of Cisco’s computing offerings with the Cisco Unified Edge Platform. Essentially a ruggedized, modular industrial server, Unified Edge is powered by an Intel Xeon CPU and Nvidia GPU, incorporates integrated storage, and features redundant (and removable) power supplies. It also offers the ability to plug-in a Catalyst family network switch (among other options). As its name suggests, the device is designed for deployments across edge environments including places like factories, retail store chains, distributed warehouses, medical facilities and more that want to run AI-powered agentic applications. Capable of running Windows, Linux, OpenShift, and several other operating systems, it’s specifically optimized to do AI inferencing on data that’s being generated within these environments.

So, for example, if an organization wants to run a computer vision algorithm, perform data analysis from connected sensors, or any of a host of other industry-specific applications, Cisco Unified Edge can leverage its compute and networking resources to do that work. This allows companies to avoid the costs of transporting all the data up to the cloud or even to their own data centers, and it reduces delays and latency issues when performing that work.

Importantly, the Unified Edge is also preconfigured to tap into Cisco’s Splunk and Thousand Eyes observability tools as well as its Insight management tools. This makes integration of these devices much easier and reduces the challenges that can be associated with remote deployments and monitoring.

Taken together, the two announcements show that Cisco is working to stay ahead of big industry trends and continues to integrate and optimize several of its core capabilities into AI-enhanced offerings with measurable, practical benefits. Cisco IQ, in particular, represents a big picture vision of where support services and network management are headed and sets the stage for an era when autonomous agents can start to simplify the process of operating and maintaining network infrastructure even further. It’s clear that we’re not there just yet, but putting the structure in place to enable autonomous agents is an important first step. In the meantime, Cisco IQ provides a practical means by which Cisco and its partners may augment their customer experience and support offerings through the use of AI.

Here’s a link to the original column: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cisco-brings-agents-network-management-compute-edge-bob-o-donnell-rmzpf

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech.