Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

The IT department is where agentic AI goes to die--or at least never make it out of proof of concept. Agentic AI needs to be driven by outcomes, returns and benefits to the business instead of technology.

That's a big takeaway from Boomi's Chris Hallenbeck, SVP and GM of AI & Platform

Boomi. Hallenbeck (right), speaking at Constellation Research's AI Forum in Washington DC, said that enterprise agentic AI is a work in progress and enterprises are still wrestling with defining the technology.

"Less than 5% of companies know what agentic AI is," said Hallenbeck, who said an AI agent is one that can perceive, reason and act. "Agents are more than conversations and within a corporate sense, they need access to my data, CRM, financial systems, HR and databases to proceed. To reason you have to give it oerating procedures."

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• Boomi launches AI Studio, makes its move on AI agent orchestration

In other words, process matters as does frameworks for governance, observability and security as well as audit trails. "Without those systems and guardrails nothing gets out of POC to production," said Hallenbeck.

Too often, the business impact is getting lost in agentic AI use cases as enterprises focus on technology over outcomes.

"If AI is being pushed into IT with a focus on code and libraries, those systems don't go live," said Hallenbeck. "You can get to POC, but it's not going to scale up to enterprise class. Folks are having a lot of fun, but if they're not dead focused on business impact it's not going live. How can I deploy a project from idea to actual positive business impact is important. It's completely doable, but you just can push it down to a CoE (center of excellence)."

That CoE approach raises the costs and leads to scope creep where enterprises are trying a big bang approach to AI agents, said Hallenbeck. "If you keep going after bigger and bigger projects the business is going to say it doesn't want to pay for it because the hurdle rate is huge," he said.

What's the approach that works for AI agents?

Hallenbeck cited one customer that took two days and built an agent to save $50,000. That's $50,000 saved in two days’ work. You scale and learn by saving one problem at a time.

"Enterprises are going after reducing costs and reducing risk and looking where they can have a higher impact on revenue and other places," said Hallenbeck, who cited one customer that used agents to insource a process and saved 27,000 hours.

Other takeaways from Hallenbeck:

• Processes. Enterprises are automating processes with AI agents, but then need to think through the overall process. "What if you rethought the entire process looking at it from an agentic perspective. Redesign it," said Hallenbeck.
• Raising the AI IQ. To drive business impact enterprises need to focus on raising the AI IQ across the workforce.
• The next phase for agentic AI in 2026 is going to be verticalized use cases.
• Agentic AI is still in early innings due to tooling, the need for situational awareness and standards.

More on AI agents:

• Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI build out AI agent use cases
• Accenture: Enterprise AI deployments hit inflection point
• AI agents, automation, process mining starting to converge
• Cognizant CEO Kumar: Agentic AI will create a reinforcing flywheel of ROI
• Pondering the future of enterprise software
• Lessons from early AI agent efforts so far
• Every vendor wants to be your AI agent orchestrator: Here's how you pick

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

ServiceNow launched AI Experience (AIx), a multimodal interface that will serve as a user interface for the company's platform. Enterprise users will be able to access ServiceNow apps, data and workflows with AI agents.

The company said AIx will be integrated throughout ServiceNow's platform. AIx will also be tailored to each user's permissions for employees, knowledge workers and developers.

ServiceNow's move comes as debate about the future of SaaS ramps. Workday recently acquired Sana to add a unified AI interface over its applications in the future. Meanwhile, enterprises are pondering using AI agents to traverse multiple applications. SaaS vendors could be disrupted if they don't become platforms or are relegated to data stores.

The other thread here is that ServiceNow is also looking to consolidate various AI agent efforts on multiple platforms. With ServiceNow's AIx, customers will be able to use voice agents to solve issues in sales, HR and IT. AIx is built on top of ServiceNow Now Assist. AIx can leverage AI agents to handle tasks in the background to resolve issues.

• ServiceNow launches Zurich release, inserts process, task mining into AI agent workflows
• ServiceNow offers US government discounts as high as 70% on ITSM
• ServiceNow posts strong Q2 as McDermott reiterates CRM ambition

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow's Chief Product and Chief Operating Officer, said:

"We are at a critical crossroads in technology. Each major shift from command lines to GUI, desktops to mobile, the mouse to touch, gesture and voice, has fundamentally rewritten the rules of work. AI is definitely transforming not just what we do today, but how we do everything. And each previous shift enterprise technology also created legacy, siloed problems. That is why ServiceNow is introducing this new interface for the enterprise, which is intuitive, multimodal and action oriented."

ServiceNow executives said AIx is a shift in how people interact with technology and SaaS apps. The upshot here is that ServiceNow is looking to consolidate enterprises on its platform and breakdown data and dashboard silos.

• The big AI, SaaS, transformation themes to watch in 2025’s home stretch
• Pondering the future of enterprise software
• Agentic AI: Is it really just about UX disruption for now?

Zavery added that ServiceNow AIx isn't just "another AI layer bolted onto the legacy tools" and "an experience which is really built for the enterprise."

A series of demos from ServiceNow highlighted the following:

• A conversational voice interface that was able to pull data and workflows from multiple apps and data stores and carry out work.
• The AI prompts guided workflows.
• AI agents knew a user's role, history and preferences.
• Adobe was used as a customer highlighting how AI agents could carry out tasks.

Key points about AIx include:

• Customers can deploy AIx via AI Control Tower across native AI and third-party tools.
• AIx includes AI Voice Agents, which can retrieve information, update records and troubleshoot issues, AI web agents that can work across browsers and fill out forms, AI Data Explorer, which connects data sources via Workflow Data Fabric, and AI Lens, which can see screens, forms and dashboards and take action.
• ServiceNow CRM will be among the headliner apps for AIx. Employees will be able to use AI agents to scan tickets, flag patterns and craft response plans.
• ServiceNow executives noted that a big theme was optionality for how AI agents work across an enterprise with multiple models. AIx's backend also discovers agents that are available via multiple agent protocols. "We pioneered workflows, we automated them, and now we're making them autonomous," said Dorit Zilbershot, Group Vice President, Product Management, AI Experiences and Innovation. "Every interaction happens with clear guardrails. People stay in control, and we give them the optionality at every level, with full visibility into how AI works and what it's doing."
• AI Lens is generally available. AI Voice Agents, AI Web Agents and AI Data Explorer will be available at the end of 2025.

Can ServiceNow AIx expand its markets?

Amy Lokey, Chief Experience Officer, said AIx is a differentiator and AI agents bring automation to indeterministic workflows. "We think that the agentic solutions are going to be really force multipliers for productivity," said Lokey.

Zavery added that ServiceNow's AI agents are built on decades of workflow data in the company's platform.

AIx is also a big theme in ServiceNow CRM.

• ServiceNow launches ServiceNow CRM: Aims to redefine category with platform, AI, workflows

Terence Chesire, Vice President Product Management for CRM & Industry Workflows, said AIx will have a big impact on workflows in CRM.

"We're replacing traditional CRM with an AI native system of action, one that breaks down silos, automates workflows and uses AI to free your teams, to thrill your customers and accelerate their growth. This is purpose built for sales fulfillment service and customer success," said Cheshire.

One BT150 member said when starting a transformation from scratch, ServiceNow's platform works well. If you had a green field, ServiceNow CRM, ITSM and every other enterprise application works. The issue is most enterprises have multiple enterprise applications and platforms. What remains to be seen is whether AI experiences can collapse SaaS apps.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Large language model providers are rapidly building in agentic AI tools to handle tasks autonomously over time. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI is open sourcing Agentic Commerce Protocol to give ChatGPT a commerce boost and Microsoft sees Office as a way to vibe work.

Add it up and the message from LLM giants is clear: Here are our foundational models at your service.

Let's take some LLM and AI agent inventory.

Anthropic

The company released Claude Sonnet 4.5 and the LLM seems to thrive at coding, but the bigger launch in the long run may be the addition of context editing and a memory tool in the Claude Developer platform.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 will have the ability to handle long-running tasks without hitting context limits or losing information. For an AI agent tasks with a project, the ability to work on something for a longer time means developers will have options for higher level tasks.

Anthropic is pretty clear about its goals with Claude Sonnet 4.5. The company says the latest Claude is "the best model in the world for building agents."

According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be able to process codebases, analyze hundreds of documents and maintain tool interaction histories. The general idea is that the latest Claude can develop software and carry out other tasks on the fly.

Also see:

• Why CxOs, enterprises need to follow OpenAI’s GDPval LLM benchmark
• Accenture: Enterprise AI deployments hit inflection point
• AI agents, automation, process mining starting to converge
• Cognizant CEO Kumar: Agentic AI will create a reinforcing flywheel of ROI
• Pondering the future of enterprise software
• Lessons from early AI agent efforts so far
• Every vendor wants to be your AI agent orchestrator: Here's how you pick

Microsoft

For its part, Microsoft is also weaving agentic AI tools into its applications. The company said it is bringing "vibe working" to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot.

In a nutshell, Microsoft's agents will be able to create spreadsheets and docs in Excel and Word and whip up PowerPoints with just a conversation.

Agent Mode will tap into Excel natively and leverage OpenAI's latest reasoning tools.

Office Agent in Copilot chat will leverage Anthropic models to whip up Word docs and PowerPoint presentations.

Will vibe working become a thing? You know Microsoft will give it a go and the term may just stick.

OpenAI

OpenAI, which has become the more consumer-centric LLM play, launched ChatGPT Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which was developed with Stripe.

With Instant Checkout, OpenAI said ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users can buy from Etsy directly in a chat. The company will add Shopify merchants soon. You see where this is going. OpenAI will be a commerce engine and get a little cut as commerce via ChatGPT expands.

For the broader agentic commerce play, OpenAI said it is open-sourcing Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is the technology behind Instant Checkout. "For shoppers, it’s seamless: go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. For sellers, it’s a new way to reach hundreds of millions of people while keeping full control of their payments, systems, and customer relationships," said OpenAI in a post.

This Agentic Commerce Protocol launch will get interesting because it's one of the first time AI players have decided to compete. Google launched Agent Payments Protocol earlier this month.

Here's the workflow for OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Two distinct AI markets have emerged. There's the AI infrastructure, superintelligence chase and funding fest with projections that border on fictional. And then there's enterprise AI that revolves around process, automation, specific use cases and compute that’ll be spread around.

The divergence between the two AI markets has widened throughout 2025 but is now inescapable. The AI infrastructure boom is all about a chase for consumer AI. In this week's saga, OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle launched Stargate’s flagship AI factory and other sites, OpenAI entered a deal with Nvidia for $100 billion in funding where the LLM player builds data centers (on Nvidia GPUs) and then gets paid for every gigawatt deployed. Sam Altman hinted at big plans.

In a nutshell, consumer AI is more like covering a sports story. OpenAI pledges $300 billion to buy AI infrastructure from Oracle. Oracle buys GPUs. Nvidia backstops CoreWeave with purchase guarantees if it has extra capacity. OpenAI also appears to be a big future buyer of Broadcom XPUs (which probably led to the Nvidia deal). Meanwhile, Amazon, Google and AWS all have to buy Nvidia but building their own custom chips for AI workloads.

GPUs are essentially like Pokémon cards being traded among a handful of really rich kids. The trading game works until it doesn't. The reality is that the numbers may not work. According to a report by Bain & Co., $2 trillion in annual global revenue is needed to fund the computing power needed to meet anticipated AI demand by 2030. Bain estimated that even with anticipated AI savings, the world is $800 billion in short to keep pace with demand.

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And then there's enterprise AI, which is slower moving but could deliver more value and result in on-prem and edge AI. Enterprise AI revolves around proprietary data sets and real returns (as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky possibly happening kind). Enterprises in multiple industries are starting to leverage their unique data and insights into new revenue streams driven by AI.

• AI Exponentials Will Rule the World
• Radically Rethink Old Models To Enable the Power of AI

Frankly, enterprise AI can be more interesting and sustainable. Enterprise AI is what will be there when this AI bubble eventually bursts. Here's a look at a few scenes from the data and enterprise AI transformation front where thinking three- to five-years pays off big.

FedEx: The metadata about packages is more important than the actual package

Rajesh Subramaniam, CEO of FedEx, laid out the transformation that's either happening or needs to happen across every company and industry. Speaking on FedEx's first quarter earnings call, Subramaniam laid out the importance of the data ground game.

Subramaniam said that data and technology is the foundation of FedEx and "that information about the package is as important as the package itself."

• FedEx: Data, optimization, scale help navigate supply chain uncertainty

"We moved 17 million packages through our network daily, generating 2 petabytes of data and 100 billion transactions across software applications," said Subramaniam. "But the real value is in the volume. It is in the unique nature of this data. Our position at the intersection of global commerce gives us an unmatched view of physical supply chain patterns, seasonal demand shifts and emerging trade corridors."

FedEx recently hired Vishal Talwar as chief digital and information officer and president of FedEx Dataworks. Talwar was the former chief growth officer at Accenture Technology and his remit at FedEx is to turn the company's physical digital assets into "next-generation AI-led capabilities."

Subramaniam said FedEx is looking to scale AI across operations and create new revenue models. For the core business, FedEx is ramping an expanded partnership with Best Buy and new Amazon business. Those logistics services will only add to the data pool.

The big takeaway from Subramaniam was that FedEx is set to reap the rewards from building out its data platform in 2020. That data platform is now "the fuel for AI," he said. FedEx has already launched its commerce platform FDX, which is used as a workflow tool and supply chain orchestrator.

"Our mission and vision has evolved to make supply chain smarter for everyone. It begins with our data platform and the insights that we have on supply chain and the role of AI and the tools that we have," said Subramaniam, who noted that FedEx will outline the data and AI strategy more in February.

Exxon: Leveraging its project data

Exxon is using AI to leverage its knowledge management knowledge that takes all the lessons learned from every project, both large and small, and store them for future use. Exxon built its database on projects well before AI.

However, generative AI was the big unlock.

Speaking at the recent a recent energy investment conference, Exxon Senior Vice President Jack Williams said: "A lot of the advantage of AI is in how good your data set is, how good is the data that AI model is learning from. And we have some great data that's built on the world's largest project database. And so, we're very optimistic that's going to make a big difference long term. It just make us that much more productive and that much better in terms of making sure that we're leveraging every single lesson, ever single bit we've learned in the past and bring that to every single project we do."

Exxon also has an internal platform that takes historical data and makes it available for AI applications. This data complements a large ERP transformation that will provide a consistent data architecture.

Speaking on Exxon's second quarter earnings call, CEO Darren Woods said cost efficiency from AI is a second priority compared to driving effectiveness. At Exxon, saving a million here and there can quickly add up to billions of dollars saved.

"A bigger value lever is frankly on the effectiveness side of the equation. We're looking better at how we can take advantage of AI to make the products that we make at much a lower cost and with much better performance parameters, find oil cheaper," said Woods. "You can just kind of go through the list of things that we do to produce the products that we make."

Intuit: AI, data investments lead to "system of intelligence"

Intuit has been ahead of emerging technology curves for nearly a decade. By building out its data platform, Intuit made a transition to generative AI. Now that Intuit has its AI model game down it's starting to leverage AI agents. Now Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi is looking to AI to reinvent the company's SaaS business, deliver a unified platform for business and accelerate growth.

Goodarzi, CTO Alex Balazs and other executives outlined a bullish vision for the company. As noted previously, Intuit is gunning for the midmarket enterprise and sticking with customers as their businesses grow.

"We believe that every SaaS company, anybody that makes software is either going to get disrupted or they're going to be the disruptors. And that's because of what's possible with AI," said Goodarzi. "We believe that SaaS players must become the system of intelligence, which means you have to be great at data, data models, data ingestion and AI capabilities to ultimately architect learning systems that learn from customers and deliver the experiences that they are looking for, which means business logic, workflows and the app layer will completely get disrupted."

• Intuit starts to scale AI agents via AWS
• Intuit embraces LLM choice for multiple use cases
• Intuit sees 'green shoots' from its generative AI strategy
• Intuit’s bets on data, AI, AWS pay off ahead of generative AI transformation

Six years ago, Intuit bet the company on data and AI. Now the pieces are in place for Intuit become the "system of intelligence" it wants to be. In July, Intuit launched a bevy of AI agents to go along with its AI-enabled human experts. This intersection is what Intuit calls AI and HI (human intelligence).

Balazs said: "Data, data services and AI are durable advantage. And as we evolve from a system of record to a system of intelligence, our all-in-one platform and agentic capabilities fuel customer growth."

Goodarzi said that Intuit's platform can eliminate 80% of the apps customers use, collapse data silos and lower costs for them.

"We are building our systems in a way where we're disrupting business logic. Ultimately, the customer can engage with us and ask for, how do I grow my business, how do I sell wine that's over $50 versus other competitors? Which customers are most profitable? Let me give you my POS data. Can you tell me which areas I should focus on? Whatever you want to engage with the platform on, we, ultimately, our data, AI and HI capabilities deliver that experience. That is a system of intelligence. That is our strategy," said Goodarzi.

Intuit has three big bets: Creating done-for-you experiences for everything from payroll, accounting, taxes and marketing to name a few. Money and cash flow services are the other big bet. And finally the midmarket will give Intuit more growth.

The data assets are impressive. Intuit has:

• 625,000 data points per business with insights on specific businesses and insights.
• 70,000 data points for consumers.
• 1,300 engineers actively building AI agents.
• Insights on more than $1 trillion in money moved.
• More than 15 large language models are orchestrated by Intuit's internal financial LLMs. Balazs added that Intuit takes a balanced approach in applying genAI, and traditional and classical AI techniques.
• Intuit's GenOS enabled 9,800 model deployment events in the last fiscal year.

Intuit will outline how it's putting these parts together at Intuit Connect in October.

FICO and Equifax: From credit scoring to decisioning platform

Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) launched its own LLMs for financial services designed to deliver accurate and auditable outcomes and trust scores.

FICO launched a series of foundational models for financial services including FICO Focused Language Model for Financial Services (FLM) and FICO Focused Sequence Model for Financial Services (FSM).

In a nutshell, FICO is taking its data and training foundational models to address specific tasks or business problems. FICO's models require up to 1,000x fewer resources than general models.

FICO CEO William Lansing said the company's investment in its data and AI platform is designed to enable enterprises to make decisions and apply intelligence across customer lifecycles. The company also inked a deal with AWS for greater adoption of its FICO Platform.

Equifax is another company that has completed a long transition to the cloud, leveraged its data sets and now is releasing new products at scale. That focus on cloud and data platforms have enabled Equifax to also leverage AI well.

CEO Mark Begor said at a recent investment conference: "The power of the AI allows us to ingest more data and we have more data than our competitors. We believe we can deliver products that are differentiated versus our competitors because I think everyone in the room knows when you use more data in this decision, you generally get a higher predictive solution. And higher predictability means ROI from our customers and it means either market share or price for Equifax."

• Equifax bets on Google Cloud Vertex AI to speed up model, scores, data ingestion
• With Equifax's cloud transformation at finish line, AI scale comes into focus

Begor added that Equifax has proprietary data that it can only use. The differentiation in an emerging enterprise AI market is leveraging your own data. "The moat is the aggregation of the data that means only we can apply AI to it," said Begor.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Anthropic named Chris Ciauri, a Google Cloud and Salesforce alum, managing director of its international business as the company continues to scale its operations.

The news comes after Anthropic raised $13 billion in venture funding and named Paul Smith chief commercial officer. Anthropic has emerged as the enterprise LLM play and is following the vertical and use case playbook.

• Anthropic lands $183 billion valuation, hits $5 billion annual revenue run rate
• Anthropic follows enterprise software industry playbook, hires Smith as commercial chief
• Anthropic's multi-agent system overview a must read for CIOs

Anthropic said it is looking to open and fill international offices across multiple continents. Anthropic noted that 80% of consumer Claude usage comes from outside the US and that its global base of business customers now tops 300,000, up from 1,000 two years ago.

Ciauri was most recently CEO of Unily, president of EMEA at Google Cloud and GM of EMEA at Salesforce.

Key points about Anthropic's global expansion moves.

• Anthropic's hire of Ciauri rounds out an international team that includes Guillaume Princen as Head of EMEA, Hidetoshi Tojo as Head of Japan, and Kate Jensen as Head of Americas.
• The EMEA expansion includes more than 100 new roles in Dublin and London as well as research hub Zurich.
• In Japan, Anthropic is opening its first Asia office in Tokyo.
• International enterprise customers cited by Anthropic included NBIM, European Parliament, Novo Nordisk, SK Telcom, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Telus and Rakuten.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Cisco announced prototype quantum networking software that aims to network quantum computers together more quickly.

The quantum networking software is part of Cisco's plan to create a unified quantum networking software stack. In some ways, Cisco is also validating IonQ's big push into quantum networking via a series of acquisitions.

In a blog post, Vijoy Pandey, Senior Vice President of Cisco's Outshift unit, said it will release three research prototypes next week at its virtual Quantum Summit. The prototypes include a Quantum Compiler, Quantum Alert, which aims to ensure quantum security, and Quantum Sync, a decision coordination app.

• Cisco launches quantum lab, unveils quantum networking chip

Pandey said Cisco is taking a systems approach to quantum network and is "building a full networking stack from the ground up: developing a quantum networking chip, control software including protocols and controllers for managing the network, and quantum networking applications that solve problems in the quantum and classical worlds."

Cisco's quantum software stack has three layers including applications designed for quantum and classical use cases, a control layer with quantum networking protocols and algorithms and a devices layer that'll connect to physical devices.

The Quantum Compiler prototype will be released next week. The compiler is focused on the scale out of circuits across multiple processors in a quantum data center. The big takeaway is that Cisco's quantum compiler supports distributed quantum error correction.

Cisco's post landed a few days after IonQ outlined its quantum networking strategy during its investor day and threw some shade at larger rivals such as IBM and Microsoft. During the presentations, IonQ outlined its networking strategy just as much as it talked about quantum computing.

• IonQ acquires Oxford Ionics for $1.07 billion, gets quantum-on-a-chip technology
• IonQ’s plan: Quantum networks extending into space
• IonQ doubles down on quantum networking, names new CEO as it eyes scale

Niccolo de Masi, IonQ's CEO, said the company aims to be the Nvidia of quantum computing and compared its networking acquisitions of Oxford Ionics and Lightsync to Nvidia's purchase of Mellanox. de Masi said "we believe we have a 5-year lead on our technical road map over any competitor."

"Quantum distribution and quantum networking is not just something for the future. It's something for today because classical cybersecurity challenges only continue to be nastier," said de Masi, who argued that quantum security is going to need a quantum network. IonQ is even planning a ground to space, space to space and space to ground quantum network.

Mihir Bhaskar, IonQ's head of distributed computing and CEO of Lightsync, said quantum networking can scale quantum computing in data centers.

Bhaskar said:

"Quantum computers and networks really synergize. It is one big network, it is one big computer when you're building a data center. And so, with the ability to build and link quantum computers at a fast enough speed, I think coming together between IonQ and Lightsync is really the Nvidia Mellanox moment that's going to allow us to take the quantum computing technology and enable it to scale."

IonQ's Jordan Shapiro, president and general manager of quantum networking at IonQ, said IonQ's quantum networking gear is interoperable with classical networking gear and that's why it's a one-stop shop for quantum networking. IonQ announced a milestone in quantum networking with the Air Force Research Lab.

"Quantum networks are here. They're already here. They're securing the world's most sensitive data and IonQ is building the foundation for the world's connected data in the future," said Shapiro.