If you’ve ever found yourself at 2 a.m. staring at page 242 of a configuration guide, hunting for the firmware version that will finally make your deployment work, you already understand the problem that Stack Automation by Quali, co-developed with Cisco, is here to solve.
Manual infrastructure deployment is slow, error-prone, and expensive. Deployment cycles routinely stretch 6–12 weeks or more. Configuration drift drives up support costs, and skilled engineers spend their time acting as human bridges between documentation and hardware rather than delivering the business outcomes that actually matter.
That has to change. And now it can.
Cisco and third-party software (both validated by Cisco) are now generally available in the Stack Automation by Quali Solutions Hub catalog. This marks a major milestone in shifting the day 0-1 infrastructure experience from manual, component-based configuration to a fully automated, cloud-like deployment model.
Stack Automation: The engine behind your infrastructure
Stack Automation by Quali is a deployment automation platform co-developed with Cisco and offered exclusively by Cisco. It’s designed to compress weeks-long infrastructure deployment cycles into hours, or in many cases, minutes.
The platform centers on the Solutions Hub, a centralized catalog where you plan, model, and automatically deploy validated software and full-stack solutions from Cisco and third-party providers. From day-0 planning (including solution modeling, component visualization, and automated bill of materials generation) to rapid day-1 delivery, Stack Automation handles the complexity so your team doesn’t have to.
Inside the Solutions Hub catalog
The Solutions Hub catalog now includes a broad range of Cisco and third-party software, enabling teams to deploy services on premises or in the public cloud like BMaaS (operating system provisioning), VMaaS, GPUaaS, and LLMaaS in minutes using out-of-the-box, validated blueprints.
- Cisco software available at GA includes APIC, Catalyst Center, Nexus Dashboard, Catalyst 8000V, Nexus 9000v, Crosswork Network Controller, Intersight, Identity Services Engine (ISE), ThousandEyes, Isovalent Networking for Kubernetes, Isovalent Runtime Security, Splunk, Cyber Vision, Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, and Cisco Firewall for Private Cloud.
- Third-party software includes Windows Server 2025, Rocky Linux, VMware ESXi, Red Hat OpenShift, NVIDIA NIMs, Qumulo, Veeam, VMware vCenter, Ubuntu, NetBox, Cohesity, Dataiku, and others, with more being added continuously.
Full-stack solution deployments, including Cisco AI PODs, Splunk PODs, FlexPod, FlashStack, and VAST Data, are targeted for GA in October 2026. You can see the full list of Cisco and third-party software available in the Solutions Hub catalog.
Essentials and Advantage: Licensing built for how you work
Whether you’re deploying standard blueprints or building fully custom, agentic-powered configurations, Stack Automation offers two tiers designed to meet you where you are.
- Essentials: Access to the full Solutions Hub catalog for standard software deployments; included at no additional cost to Cisco customers. Optional paid support is also available.
- Advantage (subscription): Unlocks advanced customization, the Blueprint Designer, GitOps integration, and agentic design tools. Charged per concurrent compute unit (CCU). See our FAQ for more information. A one-time service fee applies for automated full-stack solution deployments, available at full-stack GA.
Built for operators, practitioners, and partners
Stack Automation is built for three core user types:
- Operators: Unified computing system (UCS) admins, IT ops specialists, and app users who need validated, “right-the-first-time” deployments without requiring deep expertise across every layer of the stack.
- Practitioners: Platform engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and service designers who need to codify infrastructure, scale standardized configurations across business units, and integrate existing automation tools without rebuilding from scratch.
- Partners: System integrators and managed service providers who need to scale value-added services efficiently and manage complex, secure customer environments through a unified, multi-tenant automation framework.
All three user types benefit from a platform that meets them where they are, whether they want to customize or simply click and deploy.
The benefits of automating your infrastructure
Once infrastructure deployment stops being manual, the benefits show up fast—in how quickly you launch, how reliably things run, and how much control your team keeps along the way.
- Faster time-to-value: Stack Automation automates the entire “rack-to-app” workflow, compressing deployment timelines from weeks to hours. Automated bill of materials generation and pre-flight validation mean fewer surprises before, during, and after deployment.
- Operational reliability: By embedding Cisco Validated Designs and years of engineering best practices into fully automated deployments, human errors are eliminated. In addition, automated drift detection helps ensure the automated deployments stay in a compliant state.
- Enterprise flexibility: You don’t have to choose between speed and control. Stack Automation offers a dual-path framework: adapt out-of-the-box validated blueprints using the Blueprint Designer for a fast, reliable start, or build custom configurations from scratch by integrating your existing Ansible, Terraform, Python, or Helm code, or by using agentic tools such as NVIDIA NemoClaw, OpenAI Codex, and Claude Cowork to generate configurations automatically.
- Secure multi-tenancy: Logical partitioning, multi-tenant RBAC, and automated consumption reporting give IT leaders full visibility and governance across teams and departments, without the “shadow IT” risk that comes from fragmented tooling.
Take your first step with Stack Automation by Quali
Stack Automation doesn’t ask you to abandon your domain expertise or throw away your existing automation investments. It helps you to stop rebuilding over and over so you can deploy production-ready infrastructure with the speed and confidence your business demands.
Want to learn more before you dive in? Visit cisco.com/go/stackautomation for product details, solution overviews, and FAQs. Go to stackautomation.cisco.com to start a free, 30-day trial of the Advantage tier or create your account and start deploying Cisco and third-party software from the Solutions Hub today.
Stay tuned—general availability for full-stack solutions on Cisco infrastructure is on the horizon. More information is coming soon.
