Cisco has entered a multi-year partnership with Notre Dame Athletics to modernize the University of Notre Dame’s campus-wide network, deploying advanced networking technologies intended to improve connectivity, resiliency, and operational efficiency as artificial intelligence increases demands on higher-education infrastructure.
As an Official Technology Partner, Cisco will provide technology and services supporting a broader modernization of Notre Dame’s digital infrastructure across its South Bend, Indiana, campus.
The university is preparing for growing network requirements driven by AI applications, connected devices, research workloads, digital learning environments, and increasingly bandwidth-intensive student experiences.
Notre Dame said the project is designed not simply to replace aging networking equipment but to eliminate accumulated technical debt and move the university toward a unified multi-gigabit Cisco architecture.
The deployment will be managed through Cisco Catalyst Center, giving Notre Dame’s IT organization centralized visibility and automation capabilities across the campus network.
Nearly 1,000 new switches are being deployed throughout the South Bend campus, with the university standardizing its network on Cisco’s Catalyst 9300X switch platform.
Cisco Catalyst Center and zero-touch deployment capabilities will help Notre Dame automate configuration and maintain consistency across the university’s digital footprint.
The infrastructure upgrade is intended to support a wide range of academic and operational use cases.
Students will gain higher-performance connectivity for applications including immersive virtual reality laboratories and real-time collaborative projects, while faculty and staff are expected to benefit from greater network reliability for teaching, research and administrative operations.
Cisco and Notre Dame are also positioning the project as foundational infrastructure for the growing use of AI across higher education.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into university research, classroom experiences, administrative systems and student services. Those workloads can require substantially greater computing and networking capacity, particularly as organizations deploy more cloud applications, connected devices and AI-enabled services.
Notre Dame said its network investment is intended to support both current workloads and future device and AI application requirements over the coming decade.
The partnership extends beyond networking hardware.
Notre Dame will use Cisco Professional Services for ongoing support and customized technical guidance throughout the partnership, helping the university optimize and manage its infrastructure investment.
Cisco ThousandEyes will also be deployed to provide visibility into networks that influence digital experience and application performance.
The technology allows organizations to monitor connectivity not only across infrastructure they directly control but also across third-party networks and external environments that can affect application availability and performance.
For Notre Dame, that broader visibility could help IT teams identify whether service issues originate inside the university’s infrastructure, with an external provider or elsewhere across the internet and cloud ecosystem.
The Notre Dame agreement follows another significant Cisco higher-education deployment.
Cisco recently partnered with Georgetown University on what the companies described as one of the largest Wi-Fi 7 deployments in higher education, extending Cisco’s efforts to position its networking portfolio around the infrastructure requirements of AI-era universities.
Notre Dame Athletics sponsors 26 varsity programs and has won 38 national championships across more than a century of competition.
Recent achievements include consecutive men’s lacrosse national championships in 2023 and 2024 and the fencing program’s 16th team national championship in 2026. Notre Dame’s football program also reached the 2025 College Football Playoff Championship Game.
The Cisco partnership ultimately extends beyond athletics, providing network infrastructure designed to support students, faculty, researchers and university operations throughout the Notre Dame campus.
By consolidating its infrastructure around Cisco technologies, Notre Dame is seeking a more automated and observable network capable of supporting both traditional university workloads and the emerging requirements associated with AI-driven education and research.
KEY QUOTES:
“Modernizing our campus network is about far more than just replacing hardware; it is about building a foundation for the future of learning, research and campus life. By eliminating years of technical debt and consolidating our infrastructure onto a unified Cisco multi-gigabit platform managed through Cisco Catalyst Center, we have transformed our operations. Our team now has the proactive, centralized visibility needed to deliver a seamless, secure and fast digital experience to our campus community.”
John Buysse, Senior Director Network & Telephony Services at the University of Notre Dame
“In the dynamic world of higher education, speed is a requirement, not a luxury. Together, Notre Dame and Cisco are doing more than just connecting a campus; we’re building an AI-ready foundation that will redefine the future of learning for generations of students, faculty and staff. Fast, seamless and reliable connectivity will transform the modern education and research experience, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”
Mike Witzman, Vice President, Public Sector Solutions Engineering at Cisco
