Cisco Stack Automation by Quali reaches general availability
Co-developed platform promises to compress infrastructure deployment cycles from weeks to hours through validated blueprints and automated workflows.
Cisco has announced general availability of Stack Automation by Quali, a deployment automation platform designed to eliminate the weeks-long manual configuration cycles that plague enterprise infrastructure teams.
The platform, co-developed with Quali and offered exclusively through Cisco, centers on a Solutions Hub catalog containing validated software and full-stack solutions. Organizations can now deploy services including bare-metal provisioning, virtual machines, GPU-as-a-service, and large language model infrastructure using pre-built blueprints that compress traditional 6-12 week deployment windows into hours or minutes.
What's in the catalog
The Solutions Hub launched at general availability with an extensive range of Cisco software including APIC, Catalyst Center, Nexus Dashboard, Identity Services Engine, ThousandEyes, and Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. Third-party options include Windows Server 2025, Rocky Linux, VMware ESXi, Red Hat OpenShift, NVIDIA NIMs, Qumulo, Veeam, and Ubuntu, among others.
Full-stack solution deployments—including Cisco AI PODs, Splunk PODs, FlexPod, FlashStack, and VAST Data configurations—are scheduled for general availability in October 2026, according to details first reported by Cisco.
Two-tier licensing model
Cisco structured Stack Automation around two licensing tiers. The Essentials tier provides access to the complete Solutions Hub catalog for standard software deployments at no additional cost to Cisco customers, with optional paid support available. The Advantage subscription tier unlocks advanced customization through the Blueprint Designer, GitOps integration, and agentic design tools, charged per concurrent compute unit.
For full-stack automated deployments arriving in October, Cisco will apply a one-time service fee.
Why it matters
Infrastructure deployment has remained stubbornly manual even as application development has embraced automation. Configuration drift increases support costs, and skilled engineers spend time translating documentation into hardware commands rather than solving business problems. Stack Automation represents Cisco's bid to bring cloud-like deployment experiences to on-premises and hybrid infrastructure, directly addressing the operational bottleneck that slows digital transformation initiatives. The platform's dual-path approach—offering both out-of-the-box blueprints and deep customization—attempts to serve organizations at different automation maturity levels without forcing an all-or-nothing adoption decision.
Built for three audiences
The platform targets three distinct user groups: operators who need validated deployments without deep cross-stack expertise, practitioners including platform engineers and SREs who codify infrastructure and integrate existing automation tools, and partners such as system integrators who manage complex multi-tenant customer environments.
Stack Automation supports integration with existing Ansible, Terraform, Python, and Helm code, and incorporates agentic tools including NVIDIA NemoClaw, OpenAI Codex, and Claude Cowork for automated configuration generation. The platform includes automated bill-of-materials generation, pre-flight validation, and drift detection to maintain compliant states after deployment.
Cisco is offering a 30-day free trial of the Advantage tier. Organizations can access product details and create accounts at stackautomation.cisco.com, according to the announcement from Cisco.
This is an original analysis by the Omega editorial team. Source reporting: Automation Watch.
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