Texas A&M System Builds AI-Ready Campus IT | Cisco Live 2026

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV's coverage of Cisco Live. It's been a busy day, but it continues. We've got Vince Callum here from Texas A&M System.

Did I get it right? Yes, you did. All righty.

Vince, welcome to Techstrong TV. Thank you. Good to be here.

So Texas A&M System, a lot of people are saying, "I know College Station," but what's the system? The system is actually made up of 12 universities across the state, and eight state agencies, which is also very interesting. And, obviously we have our flagship university, Texas A&M, which has about 78,000 students.

Everybody knows the sports. But we have many other campuses, Tarleton State, Prairie View, many other campuses across the state. All in all, about 158 to 160,000 students- Wow ...

across the system. So it's one of the larger systems in the country. I like it because it's got a land-grant mission.

I grew up in horticulture and agriculture, so I'm reconnecting with that land-grant mission, which is kind of cool. And it's got a very strong need to serve workforce development and growth of the students, getting students out and successful in the world. That's the difference.

I live in Florida now, and of course we have a big university system there too. Oh, yes. Got Florida A&M, the Rattlesnakes.

Not as big as Texas A&M, but a similar charter, if you will. I think what a lot of people don't know about A&M, yeah, they know the Aggies and they know sports, but it's also a terrific research- Yes ... university.

I'm sure the whole system is doing real research in agriculture, but in cutting edge stuff too. I mean- Absolutely ... not that agriculture's not, but a big charter there of that kind of work going on.

What about the agencies, though? How does that figure in? Well, we have eight state agencies.

We have a transportation agency that's focusing on training for all first responders in the state, and actually beyond the state. They do first responder training of all types of first responders throughout the country. We have certainly agricultural extension, which is out there.

We have a campus called RELLIS. It's not quite an agency, but you can think of it as one, that does some very interesting military and proving ground stuff. For example, if there's a manufacturer of ballistic weaponry, they'll do proving ground test at our hypersonics tunnel.

So they'll test out the ballistic, see how it performs. We've got other proving ground activity going on there, including three small nuclear reactor facilities that are being tested out, fourth generation. Really?

Very cool stuff. Look, with this AI data center stuff- Oh my goodness, yes ... depending on who you talk to, we've got to get smart.

Oh, yes. And the fourth generation nuclear is very promising. It's got some very interesting safety- Is this the ones that we could put in a container, basically?

Yeah. They could be very small. They can get bigger.

And in some ways, China's ahead of us in all of that, and we got to do some catch up. Thorium. And, I think this is a viable alternative and part of our energy footprint to supply what we need in data centers.

If you're going to bring on $8 trillion in data centers- Yes ... we got to be able to power them. Yep.

Vince, you know what I realized? I never asked what your title was. Oh, yes.

I'm the chief information officer. Oh, fantastic. And for the system level, so I deal with the 20, 21 CIOs in the system.

But I'm coming from UC San Diego prior to that for nine years. Prior to that, big blue nation, University of Kentucky. All right.

We beat Florida couple years in football and basketball. Rub it in, why don't you? Yeah.

Oh. And then prior to that, DePaul University in Chicago, where I'm from. Really?

Yeah, so I've been around a bit. I got to tell you, I'm the same. Back then it was the Redmen.

Now it's the St. John's Red Storm, but we used to play DePaul quite a bit. Oh, yes.

DePaul's a Big East team now. Yeah. But, yes.

Yes. Growing up, DePaul had great teams. Yes, they did.

Great teams. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about, you're obviously here at Cisco Live.

Yes. Cisco, I don't know how many people know this, but Cisco's been a powerhouse in the EDU space. I'm in tech 25, 35 years.

Yeah. It's always been that way, it seemed to me. What's the Cisco footprint in your system?

Well, we have Cisco in lots of places in the different areas. We're relying heavily on that RELLIS campus, as I mentioned earlier. That's the backbone, because we have to do high secure military work along with very low security stuff, so we need that sophistication and complexity from our network providers.

And then we use Cisco in many of the campuses, not all. So Cisco, as you said, has been a powerhouse in education. I've been a CIO in higher ed for 23 years.

Before that, in industry. And even when I started in higher ed CIO, they were first on the list in terms of vendors that had really done a lot of work in higher ed. I love it.

I don't know if you're allowed to say or not. If you're not, that's okay, but can you give us the spectrum of Cisco sort of services? Yes.

Wireless. Yeah, we use Cisco at the wireless level, at the wired level, routers and switches. At the security level, we obviously make good advantage of Duo and some of the security footprint items.

And then, very interested in everything they're doing in their future planning and roadmap as that evolves. Especially the AI orchestration piece, because the automation of everything we need to do in networking is very important. So very eager to continue to watch Cisco.

I was here last year, and where they did a lot of the announcements around AI, and I'm seeing improvements between that last year and this year and how they're telling that- Well, look- ... putting their products together ... a year in AI, it's like dog blogs, right?

Oh, yeah. A year in AI time is seven years of- Yeah ... What is your take this year?

For instance, the cloud control, this whole agentic AI kind of infrastructure. Yeah. Agentic AI is obviously here to stay and taking over, but if you stand back and look a little bit, 20 years ago, we would think of the network and the device and the router, the switch, and all that as very important things, and we focus that.

And, oh, by the way, there's ability to manage it. The Cisco operating system for managing that. It's kind of flipping.

We're now looking at, "Oh my gosh, how can we orchestrate, get observability, get automatic response, control blast radius, single pane of glass control panel for all? " So the shift is occurring. And so the notion of getting a synergy out of all the pieces with AI is really where we're at now.

That's what we've got to be doing. Look, you're a cutting edge educational institution. You guys, I'm sure, have all kinds of AI type of res- Yeah ...

experiments underway, and Cisco's right there with you. You mentioned, or I don't know if you mentioned, this whole Project Mythos thing going on with vulnerabilities- Oh, yeah ... and stuff.

Back when I founded a security team, I remember going to a school, I won't mention Penn State, and I was trying to just talk them to put firewalls in at the time. It's going back a bit. And they said, "No, we're an educational institution.

" Yeah. It was a whole mindset about security. Yeah.

I got to imagine that's true. Oh, that's completely changed. Everybody in higher education is absolutely worried about security and concerned for a whole host of reasons, whether it be educational records and FERPA, medical records and HIPAA, IP, contracts and grants with the federal government, and ransom.

And ransomware might not be asset based, it may be just business disruption based. We had an attack on one of the popular LMSs that everybody uses that brought it down for a couple of days. Yeah.

It was a business disruption play, not so much a theft of data, and the attackers got money because of the business disruption. Right. It's a form of ransomware, right?

Yeah. A denial of service ransomware. So no, it is absolutely on the top of our list, and has been for many years now across all of higher education.

And many places have made tremendous progress, but that progress is only possible based upon the tools. Vince, we only had a short time to talk. We've got one more area I wanted to ask you on.

Yeah. How far away are you, you think, from deploying some of this agentic AI Cisco, new products they announce, services? Well, yeah, deployment is eminent.

I don't have the exact roadmap in front of me, but it's eminent. And we're looking at it because we have a wider surface area to manage. Sure.

And we have less people, or the same amount of people, so we need AI. So it's going to happen. I think within the next year we're going to see deployments, and certainly in the coming years for sure.

Maybe come back here next year and we'll get an update. Yeah. Vince, thank you for coming on.

Yeah. I appreciate it. Yeah, pleasure.

Hopefully this is good. Oh, I think it's great. We're on.

We'll be back with more. You're watching Techstrong TV.