Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) is updating its OmniVista Cirrus network management system with its release 10 milestone that was announced this week.
The OmniVista Cirrus platform is a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) network management system. The goal of the platform, according to the company, is to provide a single unified pane for management and monitoring of LAN, WLAN, SD-WAN and IoT networks. However, not all of those network modalities are currently supported. With update 10, there is a particular emphasis on improved capabilities for configuration and monitoring Alcatel-Lucent's OmniAccess Stellar WLAN access points.
"OmniVista Cirrus 10 offers advanced analytics and Quality of Experience insights," Heitor Faroni, business development, networks at ALE, told SDxCentral.
Faroni added that the new update increases scalability for ALE's controllerless WLAN solution, as well as providing a new, more intuitive user experience.
The OmniVista Cirrus platform is a work in progressALE is positioning the OmniVista Cirrus platform as its “next-generation” network management platform. Though it still has a series of critical capabilities that need to be implemented.
According to Faroni, the goal is to enable IT administrators to manage global deployments from a single interface. He added that the platform offers the promise of easy onboarding and provisioning workflows, along with analytics that facilitate troubleshooting and Quality of Experience data that enables IT to anticipate problems even before customers open a ticket with them.
Faroni commented that OmniVista Cirrus 10 today enables highly secure and scalable WLAN and IoT deployments.
"We look forward to integrating OmniSwitch LAN portfolio management and orchestration of services," Faroni said. "As we complete the transition of all capabilities into this new platform with upcoming releases, it will be a unified place to manage the LAN, WLAN, IoT, SD-WAN and cybersecurity policies."
Open APIs are the path forward for network management integrationPart of the OmniVista Cirrus 10 update is adding support for open APIs, providing a degree of extensibility.
Faroni said that with open APIs, the platform offers flexibility to integrate into all sorts of third-party solutions, as well as other solutions from ALE.
For example, he noted that the company is looking into integrations with cybersecurity extended detection and response (XDR) platforms, as well with ALE's own Rainbow Workflow platform, in order to automate vertical-specific operations for IT and OT collaboration.
AIOps is coming, soonAnother key area that isn't yet in ALE's cloud-based network management service is artificial intelligence (AI) and, more specifically, AIOps, which brings the power of AI to help improve network operations.
ALE has an AIOps solution in the market already, known as the OmniVista Network Advisor. Faroni explained that the Network Advisor is an intelligent autonomous system providing real-time network monitoring, alerts for potential risks and remediation of network issues. He noted that the AI-based network operations companion provides alerting and auto-remediation via a smartphone, allowing IT to always be on top of what is happening on their network. The plan is for OmniVista Network Advisor to be integrated into OmniVista Cirrus 10 in 2024.
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