Network Operations Simplification – Global Warming

(These are my personal views on the current state of network operations simplifications and not at all the opinion of any of my past or current employers)

Many qualified players we have today in the space of network operations simplification explains its criticality not only for the network builders but also for networking hardware and software vendors. However, we need to find real signals (products) amongst the noise to take advantage of its true potential. Incredible strides have been made in areas of network analytics, deep learning, rules, and policy build outs claiming to solve some or the other problems across various network equipment vendors and network types. 

I truly believe in some of the intelligent minds in the industry who have already started saying the real reasons why this simplification is needed - It’s not about saving OPEX; it’s an existential problem to solve for the networking industry because demands from networks are growing.

Today most of the development is happening because of this untrue push “OPEX reduction” and necessary pull of “need for data democratization & drawing intelligence from it.” This is presenting the problem as a parabolic curve to the networking software developers around the globe. Multiple different standards, tools, controllers, and language converters have taken the white spaces caused by this push and pull confusion. As a result, the importance of making the data itself intelligent coming out of these networking devices has decreased. Thus, efficient decision making with this information has taken a back seat in most scenarios. Furthermore, many adulterants are entering some of these white spaces as well. They are changing the looking glasses on already developed tools and presenting it as another one.  

Working in this space for the last 20 years, and looking at it from inside (network software development) and outside (customer's) perspective, I will attempt to explain the situation with a simple analogy. Network Operations Simplification's position can be easily equated to the current status of our atmosphere (“air”) which is important for living beings to live (a.k.a. networks to keep operating). Simplifying network operations is an existential requirement for the growing needs of networks. In this “Network Air” the ratio of multiple standards, definitions, players, and ways to solve (a.k.a. Nitrogen) as compared to fine-tuning intelligent data draw and its enablement from the networking devices (a.k.a. Oxygen) is around 80:20 or even less with growing pollutants.

Its important for all of us working in the networking industry to clean the “Network Air” by shifting little bit of focus on giving importance to the quality of data that’s coming out of networking equipment.

The need to have fresh network air (a.k.a. more Oxygen) is now, we can become the change agents.