Cisco brings enterprise AI infrastructure to the edge: CUBEd Award winner

Artificial intelligence is changing the technology equation in numerous ways, including how enterprises approach edge computing.

Much of today’s edge infrastructure was not built to support AI workloads. Cisco Systems Inc. is seeking to close that gap with Unified Edge, which earned the company the 2026 Tech Innovation CUBEd Award for the most innovative IoT or edge platform. The solution is designed to address the growing infrastructure demands created by AI workloads outside the data center.

“As we moved from enterprise workloads to generative AI workloads, the infrastructure was stressed to begin with,” said James Leach (pictured, right), director of product management at Cisco. “Now we’re seeing generative AI really moving towards agentic AI. I think of it as almost like a multiplier effect on my workforce. How would I deal with 10x as many employees in the field and be able to provide them the infrastructure they need? That’s the kind of problem our customers are facing now with AI creeping towards the data, towards the edge in a way that is really unprecedented.”

Leach spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante during an exclusive conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Cisco is bringing enterprise-grade computing, centralized management and a broader partner ecosystem to AI deployments at the edge.

Operationalizing AI at the edge

Cisco’s Unified Edge debuted in November as a converged hardware platform that combines computing, networking and storage in a modular system designed for real-time AI inferencing at the edge. It supports central processing units and graphics processing units, up to 120 terabytes of storage, redundant power and cooling and integrated 25-gigabit networking.

“We made a short-depth chassis that is capable of running real enterprise-class processors and GPUs within the infrastructure,” Leach told theCUBE. “We’re not trying to adapt a workstation or a PC, which is a lot of what has been out there in the past. We’re trying to take real enterprise-level computing for enterprise-level AI workloads and bring it out there.”

Enterprises also need to operationalize AI where data is created and processed. Unified Edge integrates with Cisco’s Intersight management platform, allowing organizations to centrally monitor and manage infrastructure distributed across thousands of edge locations.

“The SaaS management suite is something that Cisco has been leveraging inside the data center for a while with Cisco Intersight, and now we’re taking it out of the data center,” Leach explained. “We’re giving a lot more capability to the customer that’s managing this distributed environment. We’re able to take that complexity away and actually make it simpler, make it much easier for the customer to achieve that kind of zero to actually getting value out of their AI infrastructure at scale.”

Cisco is also drawing on its partner ecosystem, including vendors that provide processor technologies, software and platform-level operating systems. Unified Edge is supported by a new program that allows third-party vendors to test and validate their tools on Cisco infrastructure.

“We have this new initiative called Cisco Compatible AI Solutions,” Leach said. “What that does is it gives us a mechanism to go to some of these vendors … and we can allow them to do testing and validation and sizing and all of that on top of our Cisco Unified Edge. It can even work the other way where they can see that some of their customers leverage our ecosystem internally and they come to us for that same level of capability.”

Here’s the complete video interview with James Leach:

Photo: SiliconANGLE