Rafay Systems has announced major partnerships with Cisco, Dell, Unisys, and NVIDIA to help infrastructure providers del

Rafay Systems, a leader in infrastructure orchestration for AI and cloud-native workloads, announced it has significantly expanded its Elevate partner ecosystem, adding relationships with Cisco, Dell Technologies, Unisys, NVIDIA and others. The company says this partner momentum reflects growing demand from neocloud operators, telcos and large enterprises seeking to deliver AI services across diverse hardware platforms and vertical markets.

The partnerships highlight a fundamental shift in how infrastructure providers are approaching GPU monetization. Rather than selling raw GPU access by the hour, operators are moving toward full-stack AI service delivery that includes governance, multi-tenancy and self-service access. Rafay's platform is designed to enable this shift, allowing GPU infrastructure to be delivered as self-service compute, governed AI platforms and token-metered services across private, hybrid and sovereign environments.

The company announced several major milestones across its ecosystem. In March, Rafay partnered with DataDirect Networks to help enterprises and neocloud providers deploy large-scale AI infrastructure, combining DDN's high-performance data platform with Rafay's orchestration capabilities. On May 13, Rafay achieved NVIDIA AI Cloud-Ready validation, confirming it meets NVIDIA's standards for production-grade AI cloud infrastructure. This validation includes deployments at Yotta in India, Cassava Technologies in Africa, Firmus in Australia and TELUS in Canada.

Dell integrated Rafay into two programs in May: the Dell Extended Technologies Complete program and the Dell AI Ecosystem Program, allowing customers to procure the Rafay Platform alongside Dell AI infrastructure for multi-tenant, policy-governed AI environments. Unisys announced a partnership pairing its managed cloud services with Rafay's self-service orchestration platform, delivering a software-as-a-service layer with token-metered pricing and integrated security.

At Cisco Live US 2026 in June, Rafay became a Cisco Solutions Plus partner, enabling customers to purchase the Rafay Platform directly from Cisco on the same purchase order as Cisco AI infrastructure. The offering combines Cisco's Nexus One with Rafay's orchestration layer across Foundation, Compute and AI tiers designed for neocloud and sovereign AI providers. Rafay also signed agreements with Deloitte, Gruve, Carahsoft and 2CRSI.

According to Rupen Shah, vice president of partners and ecosystems at Rafay Systems, the shift reflects a change in customer needs. He stated that while the first wave of AI infrastructure focused on securing GPU capacity and monetizing it by the hour, the next wave is about making that capacity consumable, governable and monetizable. Shah noted that customers need the operating layer to turn GPU clusters into AI services their users can access, trust and pay for at higher margins.

The Rafay Elevate partner ecosystem offers tiered incentives, referrals and resale models to drive revenue growth. Partners receive go-to-market support through co-marketing, joint selling and dedicated assistance, along with technical enablement including training, certifications and GPU and cluster management capabilities.