Are You Fully Automated?

One common theme with recent product tests and vendor briefings and that is – automation.

Not that there’s anything new here per se; back in the mid-90s I remember working on an extensive project with the splendid Roger Green of Boole & Babbage (long since part of BMC – the company that is, not Roger) to fully automate the network fault finding and remediation thereof.

Possibly in the interests of keeping a million networking SEs in work still, automation seemed to take something of a back seat (computerised cars gag?) for a while, but now it’s back with a bang (i.e. what happens when you get one human driver on the same road as otherwise computerised cars) as I noted in an excellent briefing with Mike Wood, now of Apstra. As Mike himself said, I’ve got such an extensive collection of his biz cards over the years, I could probably decorate my walls with them, but then he’s far from the only one – and all you others, you know who you are!

Apstra has defined “intent-based networking” with the aim of fully automating the whole network service lifecycle, which kind of brings us full circle from those mid-90s days with B&B. Key to this is the validation of what you create, before you get it catastrophically wrong. Definitely a company to keep an eye or two (one, if you’re an octopus) on and I will be chatting more about Apstra, post deep dive demo in Feb. Meantime, it will be interesting to monitor how many other vendors decide that they too are “intent-based networking” oriented -)

Meantime x2, back on the automation front, I’ve just finished a test report on Densify (the artist formerly known as Cirba, as we all say) whose multi-cloud/hybrid management and optimisation tech has recently become fully automated, thanks to Cloe. Now, I haven’t met her, but I have seen her in action and what she can do with one line of code is nobody’s business… Rather than wax lyrical about the tech here, far better an option is to take a look at the report itself (it’s got plenty of pictures between the words):

https://www.densify.com/resources/analyst-report-broadband-testing-cloud-optimisation-automation

And please do proffer feedback – that’s what these blogs are all about! More to come on Densify this quarter, so be watching of this space…

And finally, a Happy New (Brexit – what’s that?) Year to all!