2019 Next-Generation Network Automation Report

Network Automation is what enables AT&T to scale their network. Chris Rice, Senior Vice President at AT&T, takes a look at the progress their automation and orchestration platform has made in the last two years — from where it was to where it is now — and discusses how AT&T uses ONAP.

Networking infrastructure is sure to evolve quickly during the 2020s. Kazuhiro Gomi, CEO of NTT Research, introduces the Innovative Optical & Wireless Network (IOWN), a new vision for an all-photonic core network enhanced by quantum technology and breakthroughs in privacy and security.

Marisa Viveros, VP of Strategy and Solutions, Global Telecom at IBM, discusses the challenges telecommunication providers are facing today. She discusses the key role that automation and orchestration will play and how IBM aims to bring that to customers.

Arpit Joshipura, GM Networking & Orchestration + Edge/IOT for The Linux Foundation, discusses ONAP’s recent release, Dublin, and how the LF’s new blueprints help operators deploy network automation at scale in production.

To advance network automation, organizations need to move from manual, human-centric command line interfaces (CLIs) to machine-driven automation. Chris Wade, Co-founder and CTO of Itential, talks about the critical issues associated with network automation and why it’s time to treat the network as code. By taking a software-centric approach, organizations can integrate across multiple domains for end-to-end network automation.

Automating a global enterprise to scale can be a herculean task. Choosing the best approach, such as using an intent-based, model-driven based network automation engine can simplify the process of automating an existing multi-vendor network, freeing precious IT engineering time to deliver strategic innovation. Gluware CEO and Co-founder, Jeff Gray, talks about how Gluware helps enterprises like Mastercard, Merck and more deploy network automation at scale and the business benefits of doing so.

The future of network automation involves acquiring key operational data within the network and tying that to automation workflows in an intelligent manner. FRINX has combined a system of multiple components (controller and agent), a workflow engine, and open-source databases into one solution that is ready to work out of the box. Gerhard Wieser, CEO of FRINX, talks about how FRINX allows customers to provision services, configure devices, and understand the state of their whole network at scale.

Data centers are becoming more distributed and smaller, says Mike Capuano, Chief Marketing Officer at Pluribus, moving into central offices or even radio base station aggregation locations. This makes network automation absolutely critical. These smaller data centers have to become software-defined.