Cisco / Outshift by Cisco

Outshift by Cisco develops technologies for businesses and developers as Cisco’s internal incubation organization. Its work includes AGNTCY, infrastructure for connecting AI agents across frameworks and vendors through discovery, identity, messaging, and observability. Webex integrates AGNTCY Directory and Identity so developers can register and publish MCP/A2A servers while enterprises enforce policies through Control Hub. Outshift launched AGNTCY in 2025; it is now a Linux Foundation project, following Cisco’s donation that year.

Cisco was founded in 1984 by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner and is led by Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins. Vijoy Pandey heads Outshift as SVP and general manager. Alongside agent infrastructure, its engineering work extends to quantum networking. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch, announced in 2026, is a research prototype that routes entangled photons while preserving their quantum state. It converts between encoding modalities and operates at room temperature on standard telecom fiber, addressing connections between different types of quantum systems.

Cisco went public in 1990. For its agent initiative, Outshift reported nearly 150 AGNTCY ecosystem members and six active working groups in 2026.