The Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI® ) is part of our intent-based networking framework to enable agility in the datacenter. It captures higher-level business and user intent in the form of a policy and translates this into the network constructs necessary to dynamically provision network, security, and infrastructure services.

Built on top of the industry-leading Cisco Nexus® 9000 platform, Cisco ACI uses a holistic systems-based approach, with tight integration between hardware and software, between physical and virtual elements, an open ecosystem model, and innovative Cisco Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to enable unique business value for modern data centers

Cisco ACI is the industry's most secure, open, and comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution.

ACI enables automation that accelerates infrastructure deployment and governance, simplifies management to easily move workloads across a multifabric, multicloud framework, and proactively secures against risk arising from anywhere. It radically simplifies, optimizes, and expedites the application deployment lifecycle.

Modern data centers are dynamic. IT operations must meet the expectation of quality-of-service business needs in a rapidly changing environment. ACI transforms IT operations from reactive to proactive with a highly intelligent set of software capabilities that analyzes every component of the data center to ensure business intent, guarantee reliability, and identify performance issues in the network before they happen.

As application usage gets more pervasive across an enterprise's network, IT professionals are looking to build solutions for consistent policy and encryption from the campus to the datacenter. With ACI integrations with SDA/DNA Center and SD-WAN, customers can now automate and extend policy, security, assurance, and insights across their entire networking ecosystem.