After the industry’s extended hiatus driven by the COVID pandemic, we are all heading back in June to Las Vegas for CiscoLive! Whew, it kind of makes my heart skip a beat just writing those words after so long. And while COVID is far from over, every person and organization on the planet is embracing their own “new normal” and re-focusing on what it takes to be successful. They are looking at what it takes to conduct business with the new set of post-COVID rules. Probably worth reminding everyone that just because COVID put a pause on business interaction work styles, technology continued to move on. And all of the companies that offer real value took the at-home COVID years as a time to continue engineering and innovation, re-think the ways that they can articulate their value and then re-tool their balance sheets to afford the resources needed to aggressively succeed in the new normal. In fact, the last two COVID years saw record numbers of IPOs and SPAC transactions as investors sought out value associated with innovation.
Innovation is king! Whereas many IT industry professionals have been executing their own hard-learned and refined best practices for decades, the new normal requires everyone to take a deep breath and think about new approaches that must be smarter, more efficient, and less labor-intensive. And these new approaches must be architected with the thinner organizational structures in mind. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report, more than 4 million professionals quit their jobs in December alone! Multiply that figure by the number of months we have been holding our COVID breathes and you can see the magnitude of the problem. And remember that with the experienced IT workers’ departures, goes their tribal knowledge. This should be very concerning to everyone reading this post. And while pre-COVID wisdom talked about the need to be more efficient, it is only with the COVID reality that these words become a make-or-break topic. It’s no longer nice to be more efficient in IT, it is the only way to stay in business!
So as IT technologists, COVID has fast become the catalyst for real change. It allows everyone to think deeply about what it takes to support the forward progression of IT, but with far less labor-centric processes. And as it turns out, IT has always been a bottom-up organization. It has already created networks device by device as a way of delivering connectivity. Many network professionals do not even know the applications that span across the network they are building, even though corporate success is defined by the success of the applications, not the devices! Enter, network intent-based automation! Network intent-based automation is one of those real opportunities available to every organization today that can directly fill the gaps created by the shrinking workforce and the need to support the growing business infrastructures, which are just getting larger and more complex. Network intent-based automation is the smarter way to approach IT problem-solving at scale, top-down, as it allows the smartest and most effective problem resolutions to be re-used over and over again by everyone across the organization. And because network intent-based automation makes problem-solving reusable, escalations are all but eliminated, reducing your MTTR significantly. Most importantly network intent-based automation focuses on the needs of the business, not the device-by-device approaches that have been the mainstay for decades. After all, nobody cares if all the lights on your network gear are happily blinking green if the quality of voice services or database access is poor. Those services are what matters, not the blinking lights!
But don’t take my word for it, come see this kind of smarter network intent-based operations for yourself! Stop by our booth at CiscoLive! next month and take NetBrain Next-Gen for a spin. And in the true vernacular of Las Vegas, NetBrain Next-Gen is one the few sure bets you can make in life. Let ‘er roll!