Hi channel insiders. I'm Victoria Derigan. Cisco unveiled a major new platform it's calling Cisco Cloud Control. And while there's a lot of product announcements within the launch, the bigger story is what Cisco's trying to accomplish. At a high level, Cisco Cloud Control is a unified platform experience designed to manage networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration capabilities from a single interface. It also introduces new tooling for building custom AI agents and applications that can automate IT and security ops.
So, let's dig in a little more on the technical side first. Some of the key announcements include a new Cloud Control Studio where customers and partners can build AI agents and applications, an AI canvas workspace where humans and AI agents collaborate together on troubleshooting and investigations, expanded security capabilities, and new protections for the AI agents themselves. Cisco's also integrating data from more than 40 ecosystem tools including some of the big names: AWS, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow, just to name a few.
But here's why this matters. This isn't just a product launch. It's Cisco making a bet on where IT operations are going to be and what they're going to look like over the next 5 years. For decades, IT teams have managed infrastructure through various, sometimes connected, sometimes not, dashboards. Cisco's vision though is that infrastructure is increasingly going to be managed through AI agents, not humans. Those agents increasingly can investigate problems, correlate data, recommend actions, and eventually might be able to execute those tasks with limited human oversight.
Cisco's calling this vision agentic ops, and it's essentially the idea that AI agents are becoming more active participants in running enterprise environments, not just helping users, human users that is, find information to go do that work themselves. Now, for channel partners, there are three major implications that we're watching. First, the services opportunity. As much as Cisco is positioning itself as the forward-thinking future of operations, you probably know as well as I do that most customers are nowhere near ready to actually deploy autonomous AI agents across their networking and security operations.
As you do this work with customers every day, you probably can see that they still need help building these workflows, defining the governance policies, and security environments that are going to keep their environment secure. They'll need help determining where that automation even makes sense in their workflows. Cisco's effectively creating a new category of consulting and implementation work here, giving people the vision, and you can give them the execution.
Now, on that note, integration expertise is becoming even more valuable. One of the most interesting aspects of this announcement is that Cisco isn't positioning Cloud Controls as a Cisco-only environment. Like I said at the start, the platform's going to connect into AWS, Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Wiz, and many others. The partners that understand how to connect customer systems together to actually achieve the vision that Cisco and its partners are outlining, they're going to be the most prepared to make more recurring revenue, build new offerings, and ultimately be the trusted advisor that their customers are going to need to be successful with this work.
And third, security's becoming inseparable from AI operations. Now, again, this probably isn't surprising if you're in customer environments every day, but it should be noted that in doing this, Cisco didn't just announce new AI agents. It also simultaneously announced the controls for governing those agents, restricting what they can do, monitoring their behavior, and protecting infrastructure from AI-related threats. That tells us something important.
Vendors increasingly see AI governance and AI security as requirements at the start, not add-ons to be addressed later. My takeaway here is that this launch is less about a new management console and more about Cisco trying to establish itself as the control plane for those AI-driven infrastructure operations that many vendors in the space are starting to promise their customers. Now, whether customers adopt that vision quickly is still an open question, and for you as a channel partner, you're likely going to be the answer.
This is the kind of announcement worth paying attention to because Cisco believes future services, future automation, and future infrastructure are going to rely on the kinds of expertise that you've given customers for decades, if not longer. So, where do we go from here? Well, for more information on Cisco and the ways that your peers are already connecting these devices, launching new advisory practices, and more, head to channelinsider.com. For Channel Insider, I'm Victoria Dergan.
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