I’ve been a networking geek for as long as I can remember. The first time I connected a Hayes Smart Modem 300—or maybe it was a Novation SmartCat 1200—to a phone line and heard those handshake tones as I dialed into a bulletin board system, I was hooked. Watching a blinking cursor on someone else’s computer respond to my keystrokes was magic. From that moment, I knew connecting machines—and by extension, connecting people—was going to shape my life.
In the mid-to-late 90s, I learned to rack routers, wire CSU/DSUs, and configure T1s. I remember thinking how peculiar it was that an ATM used 53-byte cells, a prime number that defied my intuition about binary efficiency. Then came T3s and OC3s, and the day I helped install one of the first OC12 routers felt like crossing into the future. I saw Gigabit Ethernet arrive and had the privilege of announcing the first 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ports in the world. Years, well probably decades later, I returned to the edge: designing routers that could auto-boot, self-provision, and connect branch offices without a single console cable ever being plugged in. For someone who loves networks, it was a career spent at the boundary of what was possible.
What has always fascinated me most is not just how to connect systems but how to connect everything—people, data, industries, and ideas. I’ve worked on networks that circle the globe hundreds of miles above the ground, span continents on strands of glass, and reach under oceans. I’ve helped bring compute closer to data and data closer to compute. The quest to connect society, education, science, healthcare, defense, and entertainment has never really been about wires or packets. It’s about possibility. And yet, amid all the innovation, there has always been one space that’s proven uniquely challenging: the edge.
The edge is where people and machines meet. It’s where data is born and where it’s consumed. It’s a lab microscope generating terabytes of imagery, an MRI scanner storing patient data that can’t leave the hospital, a VFX editor working with massive uncompressed video, or a self-driving car generating and streaming reams of sensor data. It’s the battlefield where the need to push data out and pull it back in is constant and unforgiving. For decades, the edge has been the hardest part to get right—too many devices, too much variability, too little standardization.
I’ve seen countless attempts to solve this. The “God box,” the “branch in a box,” the “routing switch,” the “switching router.” Every generation tried to merge compute, storage, networking, and security into a single form factor. Every generation made trade-offs that were too costly. Some were too hard to deploy. Others underpowered or over-engineered. Some couldn’t survive the harsh environments they were built for. Most required armies of engineers to operate, update, and troubleshoot. The dream was right, but the execution was never complete.
That’s why what I saw today blew me away. Cisco’s Unified Edge platform is the closest anyone has come to getting it right. It’s not another repackaged branch appliance—it’s a re-imagining of what the edge should be. It’s a system designed for reality: compute, networking, storage, and security, unified and modular, managed at scale through a single global control plane. It can sit in a rack, mount on a wall, or ride in the back of a Humvee. It’s just as comfortable caching terabytes of satellite imagery for a forward-deployed team as it is hosting virtual desktops for a bank branch or running local AI inference at a retail drive-through.
Cisco built this platform to solve the hard problems—how to run GPU workloads where latency matters, how to apply zero-trust security without sacrificing performance, how to manage thousands of identical sites from the cloud without armies of field techs. It’s modular, rugged, and built for the environments that don’t tolerate downtime. It’s designed for the edge at planetary scale.
What makes this moment so exciting is how it connects to a larger story—the convergence of data, compute, and AI. For the past two decades, we’ve centralized everything. Applications moved to hyperscale clouds because that’s where the economics and agility lived. But as AI, autonomy, and analytics have pushed the need for immediacy, the pendulum is swinging back. We’re entering an erawhere the edge matters more than ever, not as a regression but as an evolution. Compute and intelligence must now live everywhere—on a factory floor, in a clinic, on a ship, in orbit. Cisco Unified Edge, paired with Qumulo’s Data Fabric, makes that vision tangible. It brings the data platform to the edge and the edge to the data platform.
I’ve spent thirty years watching this industry evolve—from dial-up modems to multi-cloud fabrics, from copper pairs to optical backbones, from routers with command-line interfaces to AI-driven infrastructure that configures itself. But today feels like another inflection point. The unification of compute, storage, networking, and AI at the edge will change how industries operate. It will redefine the boundary between the digital and physical world.
Perfection doesn’t exist in product design—there’s always something new over the horizon—but this is the best execution of the edge I’ve seen. It’s a system that simplifies complexity, scales to thousands of sites, and does so with the elegance of a thoughtful architecture. For those of us who fell inlove with that first blinking cursor on a remote computer, this is the continuation of the same story: building the systems that connect everything, everywhere, and everyone.
The next twenty years won’t just be about connecting the world. They’ll be about empowering it—with intelligence, resilience, and the ability to reason at the edge. And that’s where the real adventure begins.
