Cisco’s AI Rally Kit delivers high performance AI without the engineering pain

Building AI solutions that are fit for enterprises and service providers is a complex and costly endeavour. It depends on finding the right pieces of a hardware puzzle that integrate with each other and don’t create processing or storage bottlenecks. And even once you know what the pieces are, putting them together in a cost-effective way that ensures a return on investment can be a tough bridge to cross.

Cisco’s CTO, Ed Green, was formerly the Head of Commercial Technology for Formula One giants McLaren Racing. He says there are some important lessons from his time there ensuring some of the world’s fastest cars made it around the track that can be applied to commercial enterprises looking to deploy AI solutions.

“F1 has such distilled objectives. You must deliver high performance to the car and help fund a race team. You've got to show up and be ready,” he says.

Supporting McLaren Racing’s Formula One operations meant processing more than 200 million data points from over 300 sensors in near real time. That data helped inform driver guidance and pit‑crew decisions, while tyre‑focused camera imagery added further insight into vehicle performance under intense acceleration and braking.

The challenge was not just performance; it was performance within constraints. Like any enterprise or service provider, Green’s team needed a technology stack that could deliver speed, reliability and insight while staying within a regulated budget.

Dicker Data was selected by Cisco to bring the AI Rally Kit to market. As the only platform of its type deployed in the region, the AI Rally Kit enables service providers and enterprises Channel partners and their customers the opportunity to test their AI solutions on a platform that has been specifically designed and tested to handle AI workflows and applications.

Simon Miceli, the Managing Director for Cloud & AI Infrastructure APJC at Cisco, says “Successful AI adoption isn't just about access to GPUs. It's about having a secure, full stack architecture that allows you and your customers to support a broad range of different use-cases.”

The AI Rally Kit, which was launched to partners at Dicker Data Innovation at Full Speed Event in Melbourne, brings a technology stack that is purpose-made to enable organisations to run their AI workloads. Rather than needing to assemble, test and integrate different hardware, the AI Rally Kit delivers a platform that enables organisations to run their AI workloads without the pain of creating an AI-ready platform.

“We had to make some strategic bets about how to create a scalable platform. We partnered with Dicker Data because their scale and reach are unmatched. We know that we have full buy-in of their team here to make this a success,” says Miceli.

The rise of AI represents a pivotal moment for organisations Miceli adds, likening it to the industrialisation of the internet.

“The internet democratised access to information. AI democratises access to intelligence,” he says.

The AI Rally Kit is not just a hardware stack. It also includes a full suite of management, monitoring and optimisation tools to ensure the environment is tuned for specific workloads.

“Many enterprise customers don't have a history in high-performance computing, and some of the technologies that exist in that space that become relevant for AI workloads,” explains Chris Gascoigne, Principal Architect for the APJC Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group at Cisco. “We came at this from the perspective of helping customers have a simpler experience deploying and operating the infrastructure for AI so that they can get the time to value down as low as possible.”

Rodney Hamill, the Managing Director – Partners and Routes to Market Sales ANZ at Cisco says “Partners can now work with Cisco and Dicker Data to see their AI vision come to life, this investment provides the canvas for partners to explore the art of the possible”

AI capacity is a strategic utility according to Vlad Mitnovetski, Dicker Data’s Executive Director and COO.

“It's like electricity. You won't be able to change the mindset of how to operate the business without access to that strategic utility. We now have access to that incredibly important utility. My message is simple. We have invested heavily with Cisco. It's hosted in Australia for you to run your models, experiment and drive intelligent use-case systems.”

As one of Australia’s leading distributors, Dicker Data is providing local partners with the opportunity to test their AI workloads on the AI Rally Kit.

As an added incentive, Dicker Data is offering a $35,000 total prize pool for the top three AI solutions developed using the AI Rally Kit, with first prize valued at $20,000. Expressions of interest will remain open until July 2026.

Find out more here: AI Pods Partner Use Case Challenge