Since its establishment by Cisco's Outshift Incubation Division, which has subsequently recruited other members, the consortium has focused on the coordination and orchestration of agents, while ensuring a sound identity access management protocol when these agents access enterprise data, open source tools, and customized large-scale and small language models. To support this direction and to give the framework a stronger foundation in the industry, the Linux Foundation officially accepted the Agntcy Alliance to join its governance model on July 29.

The background of Agntcy—and the significance of building a technology ecosystem

When “agentic AI” began to attract widespread attention in the technology field about a year ago, people realized that it could have a fundamental impact on enterprise IT transformation. Now we can understand agents that are more complex than chatbots that can take on some of the workflow tasks. But in the near future, we will need "super agents" to perform larger and more impactful operations, such as building completely autonomous network infrastructure that can self-diagnose faults and fix them dynamically. Imagine a group of super agents to make real-time dynamic adjustments through runtime analysis, thereby greatly improving the enterprise network security protection capabilities. This potential is almost limitless.

However, to unleash the innovative potential contained in proxy AI, a large amount of applied research is still needed, and the forces of all parties are also needed to integrate more entities - including manufacturers, corporate customers, research institutions, etc. - into a unified and coordinated proxy ecosystem. The development of previous generations of open source technologies proves that the ecosystem model can greatly accelerate the R&D process, and the technical standards of Linux, Android and countless other open source projects are proof of this.

Agntcy's core philosophy is designed to ensure openness, interoperability, and scalable and secure proxy problem-solving capabilities, all implemented in a "quantum-resistant" security environment to address future threats to encryption security by quantum computing. In addition to Cisco's internal Outshift Incubator (more on that later), Boomi and MongoDB are the most well-known members of Agntcy until this week. These well-known companies have also led a group of early and mid-stage startups, hoping to seize the opportunities brought by the agency-based AI boom.

In my opinion, Agntcy's most noteworthy effort to date is the software development toolkit (SDK) it developed, designed to address friction in inter-agent communication. In addition, Agntcy also provides multi-agent sample applications, which developers can directly use to speed up innovation and shorten product time to market. Recently, Agntcy also launched a GitHub repository to make it easier to access these tools and applications.

Cisco Outshift Incubation of Agntcy and Other Projects

A few weeks ago, while attending Cisco Live, I had the honor of having an in-depth exchange with the Outshift leadership team, learned about Agntcy in detail, and discussed the department's ecosystem-centered innovation strategy. (Note: Cisco is a consulting client for my company Moor Insights & Strategy.) Outshift is an incubator within Cisco that focuses on emerging technologies, with its clear goal to discover cutting-edge technologies, concepts, solutions and resources for future technical teams. From a research perspective, Outshift focuses on the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum networks, security, etc., and often cooperates with academic institutions around the world.

Through Outshift, Cisco has established partnerships with more than 75 technology companies, covering AI tool developers, model providers and multi-agent software companies, jointly promoting the development of Agntcy and accelerating its popularity. I think Outshift is more like a convergence of incubators and startups, committed to transforming emerging technology concepts into realistic solutions and implementing them on a large scale throughout the ecosystem. Over the years, I have observed many technological innovation and R&D projects funded by enterprises, most of which are oriented towards internal interests. The difference between Outshift is that it has adopted a cooperative model since its inception, which is expected to promote common progress in the entire industry.

Outshift’s achievements on the Agntcy project are impressive, especially the progress made in just a few months since the alliance was formed. However, when I first learned about the project, my first reaction was: Agntcy would have an advantage if it could attract more mature IT infrastructure providers to participate. There have been precedents in the open source community that competitors can also work together to promote standard development and technological innovation. For example, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project has successfully increased the speed of data packet processing in the entire industry.

Agntcy officially joins the Linux Foundation

Based on the above background, Agntcy's joining the Linux Foundation this time is of dual significance. First of all, this move is expected to greatly accelerate the development and wide application of the Agntcy proxy framework. As a project under the Linux Foundation, Agntcy will further optimize the agent's discovery, identity authentication, messaging and observability functions through the working group mechanism. In my opinion, these are the most critical underlying abilities. To fully utilize the potential of an agent-based workflow, identity access management and orchestration mechanisms will be one of the biggest challenges.

Secondly, with Agntcy upgrading to the Linux Foundation project, its member lineup has also ushered in new members: Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat. From my point of view, this not only verifies the value of Outshift's previous work, but also gathers strong resource support for Agntcy's success.

The future prospects of proxy AI are bright

The prospects presented by proxy AI are exciting. The recent new solutions released by Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are showing its huge potential in reshaping highly autonomous network and security infrastructure. However, problems such as identity access management, resource allocation, and agency sprayl still need to be properly resolved to ensure the accessibility of technology. With the support of Cisco, Agntcy has now received the support of new members and the Linux Foundation, and is expected to truly realize the full implementation of proxy AI in the fields of enterprise networks and IT.

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