New ‘Cisco Unified Edge’ brings data center AI processing power to the Edge, execs say

‘Imagine picking an AI cluster and shrinking it down so you could actually put it in every branch office or put it in every location where you needed that kind of processing. Today you bring your data to AI for processing. Tomorrow, you bring AI to your data,’ one partner told CRN about the new Cisco Unified Edge platform.

With data volumes at the edge on the rise, Cisco has created an integrated, networking, compute, storage and security-packed appliance that will help businesses meet their agentic workloads where they are.

Cisco Unified Edge, "not a server, but a platform," according to Cisco, is an integrated compute platform that extends data center power and scale to the edge of IT networks to where real-time applications and AI inferencing data is generated, the company said at Cisco Partner Summit 2025.

The modular platform brings together compute, networking, storage and security in a single system for businesses and channel partners to simplify AI workload management. The platform supports third-party vendors such as Nutanix, VMware, and Microsoft, depending on what customers may already have in their environment.

"There's a lot of goodness that we put inside this chassis. We really spent a lot of time interviewing customers, trying to understand what is happening at [their] locations, so we could make the best possible system. That means, they wanted data center-level redundancy out at the edge to be able to address [new] use cases and to have infrastructure that can last for the next 10 years," Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, told CRN.

AI has "massive" implications for IT infrastructure. One of the biggest constraints to AI adoption is the lack of foundational infrastructure needed to support both traditional and AI workloads, said Jeff schultz, senior vice president of portfolio strategy for Cisco's product organization.

Many enterprises now need a decentralized network architecture to support their future growth and AI plans. It's a problem that Cisco is attacking "head on" with offerings like Unified Edge, Schultz said.

Unified Edge has been further infused with Cisco Intersight, the company's cloud-based platform for data center management. This lets customers extend the same operation and automation model used in the data center all the way to the edge, according to Foster.

"Vendors in this space haven't really looked at the edge to [offer] a unified, easy solution for customers to deploy, manage and operate over the next 10 years. Then you throw AI on top of it, and now you have a whole lot more data being generated at the edge [and] a whole lot higher compute requirements," he said.

Foster said the offering can help simplify edge operations for a range of diverse industries with multiple locations, such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing that often suffer from complex IT deployments, limited IT staff, and security fragmentation.

Cisco, with Unified Edge, is helping to solve today's physical infrastructure problems with an eye on the future and moving into "the world of AI," he said.

"There's a slot in the front that will allow you to put things like NVIDIA GPUs into the system. So for customers who are in healthcare or retail, where they're doing things like using computer vision to try to analyze what's going on at those locations, those are the type of use cases we want to help unlock for customers," he said.

For partners, the opportunities around Unified Edge are "right now" as many customers are uncertain about what they should be doing with edge computing and how changes from their ISVs are going to impact edge requirements over the next five to 10 years, Foster said.

"Cisco Unified Edge for the channel partners represents an opportunity to put a system in place with customers that can deliver what they need today as well as what they're going to want or need tomorrow," he said.

The AI conversation to date has been largely centered around sending data to and from a centralized data center. But the future of AI, especially use cases such as robotics and computer vision, will require a highly distributed architecture, said Neil Anderson, vice president and CTO of cloud, infrastructure and AI solutions for World Wide Technology, a Maryland Heights, Mo.-based Cisco Gold partner.

"Where AI is moving, [the use cases] need real time. You're going to need edge AI. Today, it's very centralized. It's a nice, tidy Nvidia cluster sitting in a data center," he said.

Cisco Unified Edge, however, is a "complete" platform for edge AI processing, Anderson said.

"Imagine picking an AI cluster and shrinking it down so you could actually put it in every branch office or put it in every location where you needed that kind of processing. Today you bring your data to AI for processing. Tomorrow, you bring AI to your data, wherever that is, [like] out in manufacturing, or out in branch offices," he said.

By 2027, 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge, according to recent data from Cisco.

The Cisco Unified Edge platform is orderable now and will be shipping in December, Foster said.