The new Unified Edge comprehensive product is designed to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities directly into retail stores, healthcare facilities, and manufacturing facilities.
The new Unified Edge comprehensive product is designed to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities directly into retail stores, healthcare facilities, and manufacturing facilities.
As Bloomberg reports , Unified Edge is a ready-to-use server rack that combines chips, storage, networking equipment, and security and monitoring software.
The key advantage of the product is its ease of deployment:
Plug-and-play: The equipment is designed to be simply connected to the network in locations where qualified IT professionals are not typically available.
Remote Management: Management, monitoring, and troubleshooting are performed centrally by corporate technicians.
“In these branches, in stores, or on factory floors, it’s very difficult to remotely manage when something goes wrong… They put these systems together, but when there’s a problem, there’s no way to remotely monitor or properly manage them,” explained Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jitu Patel.
Unified Edge uses Cisco's own products for networking, security, and monitoring tasks, but allows customers to choose processors from vendors such as Nvidia or Intel.
Currently, most AI work is concentrated in large, centralized data centers. However, Cisco and other companies believe that the future lies in running AI tasks locally.
This approach allows, for example, cameras in a factory to analyze product quality in real time, or store security systems to instantly respond to unauthorized behavior without sending all data to a central cloud.
While many companies are just beginning to consider deploying AI at the edge, Cisco already has early customers testing the new product, including Verizon.
The equipment is now available for order and is expected to become widely available by the end of the year.
Earlier, Jitu Patel told CNN that he disagreed with the idea that artificial intelligence would kill entry-level jobs, a week after the company laid off more than 200 employees.
