New Linux Foundation project takes aim at multi-vendor agent interoperability 

As agents develop in the enterprise, the true promise isn’t an individual agent going off and performing a task on its own, the true benefit will happen when agents, possibly from different vendors, start working together.

Cisco has called this the ‘Internet of Agents,’ a nod to the Internet of Things, but instead of a web of sensors, it will be a web of agents. To achieve this vision, agents need a standard way to interact with one another, an idea Cisco addressed back in March with the release of the open source AGNTCY project.

On Tuesday, Cisco contributed the project to the Linux Foundation, where it picked up some big name partners, including Dell and Google Cloud. Conspicuously missing, however, were Amazon and Microsoft.

“The AGNTCY project lays groundwork for secure, interoperable collaboration among autonomous agents,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said in a statement.

In order for agents to interact with one another in the way Zemlin describes, they will need an infrastructure layer that includes some key components found in AGNTCY. These include the ability to discover other agents, provide valid identity credentials before sharing data or taking actions, secure messaging to communicate with humans and observability to see what’s happening as these agents move through the world.

John Roese, global chief technology officer and chief AI Officer at Dell Technologies sees this as a way to help agents work better together. “The Linux Foundation’s AGNTCY Project is an important step towards turning isolated agents into a cohesive system by fostering collaboration and interoperability across organizations, vendors and frameworks,” Roese told FastForward.

David Linthicum, an independent cloud consultant, sees it similarly, “The AGNTCY project’s move to the Linux Foundation represents a meaningful step toward building an independent interoperability layer for cloud and network infrastructure,” Linthicum said. 

Jason Andersen, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy has a different perspective. He says that most agents today are performing a workflow on behalf of an individual to complete a defined task. AGNTCY is looking at something a bit more ambitious than that. 

“What AGNTCY is attempting to do is create identity for agents that are autonomous and therefore not acting on behalf of someone and that may span multiple platforms. So, it’s a bit different and more futuristic than what we are seeing in the market,” Andersen said.

He says this makes sense for Cisco, which is focusing more on agents that configure and optimize machines, but whether this gains widespread acceptance like MCP or Agent2Agent agent communications protocols depends on a lot of factors. It’s worth noting that Google donated the A2A protocol to the Linux Foundation earlier this year.

Andersen says the absence of Amazon and Microsoft, the two top cloud vendors, could end up bogging down the project's ambitions to become a standard.  “Whether the big cloud vendors get on board with this like they did with MCP, or find a way to extend their existing frameworks isn’t clear and could determine whether AGNTCY gets further traction,” he said.

Featured photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash