There’s no arguing that network automation has changed considerably over the last 10 years. When I first began working in the automation industry, customers rarely had automation in their view and had to be convinced to even start their automation journey. Manual changes were the norm and many customer’s idea of automation was simply a few scripts that a clever network engineer had created. While scripts are a great place to start, they simply didn’t scale.
I’d like to share a quick story on my automation journey and what led me to Itential.
The Progression of Automation Requirements
One of the first customer engagements I participated in, at one of the largest North American Service Providers, was an effort around the orchestration of L2VPN services. I spent a number of months as part of a team implementing a L2VPN solution streamlining order entry, customer access, and network provisioning. At the time, I was surprised to learn that most of the time spent was not automating the network itself, but on the integration of the myriad of customer applications (order entry, inventory, billing, address management, etc.) that needed to be orchestrated along with the network. Although I was initially focused on developing and implementing the network automation strategy, the integration effort for those applications surrounding and supporting the network dwarfed that effort. The end result of the project was a working automation solution, with a significant accumulation of bespoke software largely focused on system integrations. The resulting solution required ongoing software development and test efforts to maintain the solution.
But in today’s modern network with the proliferation of SDN, cloud, and security requirements, networks have been further complicated and inevitably made automation a requirement. It’s no longer practical to have brittle, narrowly focused, hand coded integrations that were the norm 10 years ago. As today’s multi-vendor networks grow in complexity, business requirements are shifting, and automation must keep pace. Services led software development initiatives, deploying costly, bespoke hard coded solutions are not able to deliver automation solutions at the velocity nor price point needed in the currently rapidly changing environment most customers exist in. Most customers can’t maintain the result of extended software development efforts, therefore low-code platforms are key to providing maintainable and scalable automation solutions.
Modern Networks Require Comprehensive Automation
What is the solution for successful automation initiatives for today’s complex multi-vendor multi-domain networks? A vendor agnostic cloud-based solution that can easily support the rapidly growing list of integrations for operations, ITSM, order management, orchestration, and cloud-based systems at scale. Equally as important, these integrations can’t be left as a software development exercise for customers trying to deploy automation solutions or worse, as a costly services engagement add-on. Additionally, the feature velocity required to deploy automation in today’s environment doesn’t support large complex software development efforts and low-code environments are critical to successful automation efforts.
That’s why I’m excited that my automation journey led me to Itential. I can now truly help our customers make significant progress on their automation journey without being dwarfed by time-consuming and costly integrations. Our true focus is on playing a key role in building successful and imperative network automations that don’t take months to get started.
The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code, vendor agnostic automation platform focused on true end-to-end automation. Itential’s library of Pre-Built Integrations has hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations across any CLI and API technology so you can integrate with everything in your ecosystem. We also have a rich library of Pre-Built Automations to help customers jumpstart their automation efforts around the top networking use cases such as software upgrades, DNS management, SD-WAN branch management, device onboarding, and more.
These libraries provide customers the automation velocity needed to keep pace with today’s network challenges and the flexibility to deal with tomorrow’s challenges. Deployed in the largest networks around the world, our platform is delivering automation at scale for a myriad of use cases.
If you’re interested in a trial of our Itential Automation Platform, you can get started by requesting a free 30 day trial today or reach out to our automation experts to set up your custom demo.
Dan Sullivan
Principle Solutions Architect ‐ Itential
Dan Sullivan is a Principal Solutions Architect at Itential who has spent his career focused on networking and distributed systems, holding roles within software development and architecture teams, professional services, and sales organizations. Over his career, he’s received numerous patents for his work on distributed systems and high availability routing/switching platforms. During the past 10+ years, Dan has been delivering and deploying automation solutions for the largest Service Provider and Enterprise customers across the world. At Itential, Dan works closely with customers to implement Itential’s automation solutions to drive both transformational business and technical outcomes.
