Cisco Agile Services Networking: What partners should know
Cisco Agile Services Networking is a "blueprint" for AI connectivity: here’s what’s included
Cisco Systems took to Cisco Live EMEA 2025 on Tuesday to unveil Cisco Agile Services Networking, a new architecture for AI connectivity that will help service providers monetise the delivery of assured services and networking.
It's what the tech giant is calling a "blueprint" for service providers for AI connectivity and related services, according to California-based Cisco.
Cisco Agile Services Networking includes new hardware, like the new Silicon One and Cisco 8000 products, which have been designed to bring AI traffic closer to the network edge to reduce latency and costs.
Ahead of Cisco Live EMEA, Greg Owens, director of service provider product and solutions marketing for Cisco, sat down with CRN to talk about agile networking strategy, the integration of AI in Cisco's products for more automation and cost savings, and the importance of partners in helping service providers monetise new networking services.
Here's what solution providers need to know about Cisco Agile Services Networking.
Cisco Silicon One
The hardware component of Cisco Agile Services Networking includes new Silicon One systems and platforms designed to sit at the edge of the network to bridge the gap between end users and the core network for less latency.
Agile Services Networking will also help make networks more flexible and responsive to AI's unpredictable traffic demands, Owens said.
The new Silicon One-powered 8000 router series will offer consistent network control, sustainability, security, and manageability.
New offerings include the Cisco Silicon One A100 and K100 devices for fixed, centralised, and modular systems.
The first of Cisco’s Silicon One-powered 8000 series, which comes in a smaller form factor and uses less energy than the 9000 series, will begin shipping in the Spring, according to Cisco.
"There’s lots of opportunities [for service providers] to build their own datacentres, in some cases, and we want to make sure that they're thinking of those opportunities and Silicon One gives them an alternative,” said Owens.
“From a supply chain perspective, it doesn't have to just be a chip from Broadcom, or Nvidia or from Qualcomm. It can also be from Cisco as well.
Pluggable optics
The second component of Cisco Agile Services Networking is its pluggable optics.
Cisco is making it easier for service providers to replace transponders with coherent pluggable optics, Owens said.
"We now have pluggable optics.
“They look about twice the size of a USB key [and] all the functionality replaces what used to be an entire switch.
“Now you can replace that whole optical switch with one pluggable optic that just goes into an IT switch, which is a huge reduction in space and power consumption, and our optics support any vendor.”
Cisco also now supports ultra long-haul applications to connect locations up to 3,000 kilometres apart with 400G coherent pluggable optics.
Cisco coherent pluggable optics will also ship in the spring, Cisco said.
Network automation and assurance
Agile Services Networking also includes network automation and assurance features, including Cisco crosswork network automation and provider connectivity assurance, formerly the Accedian Skylight technology that Cisco acquired in 2023.
This offers predictive AI technology for network capacity planning and resource allocation for service providers, and it also will allow these providers to offer service-level agreements (SLA's) to their end users, Owens said.
Provider connectivity assurance integrates with Splunk so customers can correlate application and infrastructure performance data and drive automated decisions that accelerate resolution, Cisco said.
The network automation and assurance features, which also rely on Cisco's ThousandEyes technology, are available now.
The service provider focus and partner opportunity
Owens stressed that while the Cisco Agile Services Networking announcement is geared toward service providers of all sizes, he emphasised the opportunity of Cisco’s channel partners in helping service providers figure out their strategies and monetise new services, such as datacentre interconnect and network slicing.
"I think our partners can work with service providers and say: 'Look, this is a monetisation opportunity. Let's look at our market and let's see who's in our market. Should we be offering datacentre interconnect? Should we be building our own datacentre and offering that as a service? What can we do for enterprise customers?',” Owens said.
“I really think our partners are really going to be vital to helping service providers understand how they can use this technology to their advantage and monetise it, because we at Cisco just don't have the scale to do that.”
In addition to service providers, large enterprises building out datacentre infrastructure, especially in light of AI use cases, will be interested in the new offerings as well, Owens added.
Mistral agentic AI partnership
Alongside the announcements made at Cisco Live EMEA, the company announced a partnership with French AI startup Mistral AI, in an attempt to boost product renewal times.
The partnership will result in the creation of an AI agent that the two companies say will cut down on product renewal times for Cisco’s own renewal team.
Paris-based Mistral, which was founded in 2023 by former Google and Meta employees, specializes in open-weight large language models (LLMs). The new custom AI agent will be just one of several AI agents being co-developed by Cisco and Mistral AI as part of its strategic technology partnership, the two companies said.
Mistral AI is funded by about 40 investors, with Cisco being one of the more recent investors, according to Crunchbase.
The AI Renewals Agent will simplify processes for Cisco's internal Renewals team by pulling in and analysing data in real-time from 50 different sources to build custom proposals that can be tied to specific customer outcomes, according to San Jose, California-based Cisco.
This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.