The edge is having its moment—and it’s about time.

For years, edge infrastructure was the scrappy sidekick of enterprise IT: fragmented, underpowered, and frankly, more trouble than it was worth for anything beyond basic connectivity. But something fundamental has shifted. We’re moving from a passive edge that simply collects data to an active, purpose-built edge that processes, decides, and acts in real time.

This transformation is exactly what we explored in our recent webinar with GigaOm analyst Jon Collins and Cisco’s own Jonathan Gorlin. The conversation crystallized a truth that many organizations are just beginning to grasp: the edge isn’t just evolving—it’s being completely reimagined for an AI-driven world.

The numbers don’t lie

Analysts believe that 75% of enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge as AI workloads shift from centralized model training to real-time inference. That’s not a marginal shift—it’s a fundamental redistribution of where compute happens.

Why? Three reasons keep coming up in customer conversations:

• Sovereignty and compliance requirements that keep data local
• Latency demands for mission-critical applications that can’t wait on a WAN connection
• Bandwidth constraints that make cloud processing impractical or impossible

Think about combine harvesters generating yield data that influences futures markets, or retail stores running AI-based fraud detection on video feeds, or manufacturing facilities performing quality control with computer vision. These workloads can’t afford the round trip to the cloud.

The problem: Your edge infrastructure wasn’t built for this

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: most edge deployments today are cobbled together. They lack the guarantees of a data center but face all the challenges—environmental hazards, spotty connectivity, physical security risks, dust, heat—with none of the specialized staff to manage them.

As Jonathan Gorlin put it during our discussion, “Rolling a truck is the worst outcome, so we have to design to avoid it at all costs.” Yet traditional edge architectures practically guarantee you’ll be dispatching technicians regularly.

The solution isn’t just better hardware—it’s rethinking the entire stack. You need distributed compute with centralized management. Cookie-cutter repeatability across hundreds or thousands of sites. The ability to rightsize infrastructure and scale without truck rolls. Support for both traditional VM-based applications and modern containerized workloads.

In short, you need fully stacked platforms that converge compute, network, storage, and security as only Cisco can.

Purpose-built for the modern edge

During the webinar, we dove deep into what a true full-stack edge solution looks like. It starts with understanding your application requirements—virtualized or containerized, special accelerators needed or not—then selecting the right architecture and hardware platform. Ideally, the platform would be modular to accommodate a wide range of use cases and include integrated compute, networking, security, and cloud management to address the unique challenges of the distributed edge.

This is where our partnerships matter. Cisco has partnered with best-of-breed ISVs including Nutanix, Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, and Canonical to give customers choice and deployment confidence. Our integration with Nutanix, in particular, showcases what’s possible when hardware and software are seamlessly integrated with a joint support model.

The magic happens with Cisco Intersight and zero-touch provisioning. With Cisco-curated blueprints, systems are deployment-ready the moment they’re claimed. No more manual configuration across multiple sites. No more inconsistency issues. No more security vulnerabilities from configuration drift.

What’s next?

Jon Collins reminded us during the webinar that what’s now possible in a small rack locked in the corner of a warehouse was once the domain of the machine room. The shackles have been removed from edge capabilities, making this an ideal moment to review investments and modernize your approach.

Whether you’re running point-of-sale systems or vector databases powering LLMs, the edge infrastructure you choose today will determine what’s possible tomorrow.