Every organization I talk to wants to be “AI-ready,” but few want to discuss what that entails.
It’s rarely a new model or agent. More often, it’s the unglamorous work of ripping out a decade’s worth of infrastructure debt so the network can deliver the bandwidth, consistency and data that artificial intelligence depends on.
That’s the real story behind the recently announced multiyear partnership between Cisco Systems Inc. and Notre Dame Athletics. The more interesting part is what the University of Notre Dame’s information technology team already accomplished: It replaced 955 switches across roughly 170 buildings in about five months, all while the campus never went offline.
The news
Notre Dame has standardized its wired campus with Cisco Catalyst 9300X multigigabit switches, managed via Cisco Catalyst Center with zero-touch provisioning. The deal also includes Cisco Professional Services and Cisco ThousandEyes for visibility into owned and third-party networks. The first building was cut over during spring break in March, and by Aug. 1, all but a handful of single-switch sites were completed.
The starting point is something all too familiar to anyone running a large enterprise network. John Buysse, senior director of network and telephony services at Notre Dame, told me the switches ranged from “a couple years old” to “probably 15-plus years old,” spanning roughly 28 models and more than 100 operating system versions. All of it was Cisco, a reminder that a single vendor doesn’t mean standardization.
“The level of coordination needed to make sure business in each building continues is sort of intense,” said Tracy Weber, Notre Dame’s chief information officer. Even over the Christmas break, the hotel, restaurants, and athletics keep running. “This place never shuts down.”
The demand for bandwidth continues to grow. Buysse said campus bandwidth usage “more than doubled” between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2026, largely due to video. By 2030, the goal is “to be able to support a 100-gig connection to an end user, not across the board, but where it’s needed.” The network is planned around a 10-year lifecycle.
Weber was clear about who sets the bar. “Our students have very high expectations for network performance, and it’s not just their personal devices,” she said. “The washers and dryers in the residence halls need to connect to the app that tells them how many minutes are left.”
She also recalled a student tour guide pointing out the IT building: “That’s the IT center. They pretty much just run the network.” Her measure of success is telling: No complaints in The Observer, the student newspaper, “is a good sign because it does hit the news when they are not happy.”
Here are my five lessons that should matter to information technology leaders in industries well beyond higher education.
Get off the rolling-refresh treadmill
Notre Dame’s sprawl wasn’t the result of neglect but of a sensible-sounding policy. “Our previous approach, which led to a wide variety of hardware, was just yearly upgrades,” Buysse said. “That took a tremendous amount of our time. So we made the conscious decision to change our approach and upgrade all of campus at once,” freeing the team “in the off years to focus on other strategic goals.”
The user impact was inconsistency. “We would routinely receive service tickets about things working for users in one building, and then go to another building, where it was not working,” he said. The new goal is that “regardless of what building a user may end up in, they have a consistent experience.”
For retailers, banks with branch networks, or manufacturers with plants of different vintages, the lesson still applies. Incremental refreshes may feel prudent, but the hidden cost is drift. Run the math on a consolidated refresh, including labor, before defaulting to another year of piecemeal upgrades.
Wireless now dictates the wired design
The switch refresh was driven in part by Wi-Fi. “As we upgraded the campus to 6-gigahertz-capable, we needed improved back-end bandwidth,” Buysse said. “The multigig bandwidth has improved the wireless experience and benefited users who need wired connections.”
Power was the other constraint. “We were heavily underutilizing switches because we couldn’t fully populate them without blowing the PoE budget,” he said, pointing to cameras and phones alongside access points. IT leaders planning Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 should budget for the switch refresh and power over Ethernet headroom alongside it, not as a follow-on.
Consistency is a security control
A network with 100 operating system versions can’t be patched at attack speed. Notre Dame now runs three golden images in Catalyst Center, with what Buysse described as “constant auditing to show compliance that all of our switches are configured consistently with that golden image, so we know we’re at a secure level.”
The payoff comes on disclosure day: “When the vulnerabilities come in, we know exactly what our exposure and vulnerability are.” Buysse noted that users will mostly notice the new capacity services. The bigger win “is on the back end that they don’t see,” namely “improving our security posture across campus.”
AI operations need visibility first
Notre Dame isn’t running agentic network operations yet, but Buysse expects to start soon. “It’s not realistic to throw more people at it, and people can’t respond as fast as AI,” he said.
The foundation for that is ThousandEyes, deployed on main building switches and on endpoints when users report problems. “The ultimate goal is to have that visibility, know a problem is starting, and get it resolved before users see the problem,” Buysse said.
An AI agent is only as good as the data it can see, and device health alone won’t tell it what users experience. Get experience-level telemetry in place, including the cloud and software-as-a-service paths users depend on, before buying AIOps.
Sequence the work and forecast broadly
Notre Dame’s approach was to get the network in place, stabilize it, then add advanced capabilities, “taking them one step at a time,” as Buysse put it. He noted that trouble tickets rose right after cutover, as expected when “you replace 955 switches and all of those network connections.” Volume has since dropped now that the semester is underway.
Weber made an important point about planning. When the team built the forecast, “AI wasn’t as clear that it was going to be as important as it is now. But more generally, the forecasting was based on supporting research, and AI is absolutely part of that research.”
In other words, the network was sized for the institution’s mission, not a specific technology trend, which is why it held up when AI arrived. IT leaders in other industries should forecast based on business growth, not hype cycles.
Final thoughts
The takeaway from Notre Dame is that AI readiness is an infrastructure outcome, and technical debt is the biggest barrier to achieving it. My advice for IT leaders in any industry: Inventory the models and software versions you’re actually running, align the switching refresh with your wireless roadmap, treat configuration consistency as a core security control, and invest in experience-level visibility before adopting AIOps.
Do those things, and AI becomes something you can operationalize rather than just talk about.
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.
Photo: Notre Dame
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