Cisco ACI is a an industry-leading secure, open, and comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution. It is a turnkey solution that simplifies and streamlines infrastructure deployment and management, and speeds up the application deployment process. The software is equipped with advanced capabilities that allow IT professionals to be proactive in maintaining the data center's components, ensuring business goals are met, and identifying potential network performance problems before they arise.

Cisco ACI abstracts the underlying infrastructure to business metrics, making it easier to manage the complexity of networks and enabling consistent policy and encryption from campus to cloud. It automates the network, enhances security, and helps businesses move to a cloud or multicloud environment. Customers can leverage the software to deploy workloads in any location, whether large or small, on premises or remote, in private or public clouds, satellite data centers, or 5G-enabled telecom edges.

Cisco ACI has evolved over time, expanding from supporting a single site and single pod to multi-pod and multi-site to hybrid cloud architectures. With the latest update, customers can manage their on-premises networks from the cloud by deploying it as an EC2 instance.