During the Gartner IT Symposium 2022 held last month, tech giant IBM and orchestration platform Pliant announced a collaboration to aid the growing enterprise need for improved network speed and management.

The union looked to present the combined tools of IBM network automation "Paks" with Pliant's API-driven building functions to their customer base in the process of network modernization.

The move came as NTT released its 2022 Global Network Report which found ubiquitous dissatisfaction with current network capabilities among enterprise leaders – with cybersecurity and private 5G as central factors driving the move to modernize.

IBM GM Software Defined Networking Andrew Coward dove into these ecosystem shifts and challenges with SDxCentral over an email-conducted interview.

SDxCentral: Can you dive a bit more into the enterprise ecosystem's growing needs for improved networks?

Coward: Enterprises are certainly spending heavily to automate their networks. With a market value expected to reach upwards of $23 billion by 2027, network automation continues to stand as a priority for enterprises both large and small.

Because these networks typically have hundreds or even thousands of devices from many different vendors requiring configuration and maintenance, when network problems occur, they typically show up as outages that impact business transactions and the ability for enterprises to conduct both internal and external-facing operations.

However, you’ll hear from many network managers, and therefore business leaders, that they’ve “lost control of the network." They’ve bought different tools to manage different components of their infrastructure, and their own global network is being supplanted by traffic passing in and between the cloud providers. For these reasons, there is no clear picture of where traffic goes, or how applications are affected by problems in a network they no longer control.

SDxCentral : What are the challenges or stalls to this shift?

Coward: Our vision is to bring control and policy management back into their management realm, regardless of what networking connectivity is required or where in the cloud it might live, so you can drive the proper connectivity and the automation and bring some order back to what’s a chaotic environment right now.

This is a challenge, however, and it's only being amplified by the move to the cloud. Business leaders need visibility to understand how their applications are performing from a network perspective.

The challenges with network automation amongst business leaders is similar to what we’re hearing from the broader banking community.

So, let’s think about a bank that’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if that mobile network goes down in a particular country, or you’ve experienced a major outage, it’s still the bank’s fault. It’s comparable to shutting the doors and not opening your bank in the morning.

These are really complicated and difficult problems to resolve. But in fact, some banks have decided to try and avoid putting stuff into the cloud until they can resolve these issues.

SDxCentral: Can you speak more to the importance of updating to no-code/low-code interfaces for network deployment, from the enterprise perspective?

Coward: For the enterprise, it’s all about efficiency and lowering operational cost. In many ways, compute has become easy to manage (relative to networking) because there are fewer vendors in the ecosystem.

By contrast, networking is a veritable zoo of different products and vendors – firewalls, load balancers, routers, gateways to name just a few all with their own care and feeding regimes.

So by normalizing management across many vendors and ensuring network stability and security, organizations can improve service delivery speed, prevent vendor lock-in and extend and expand a business’ capability – all while ensuring [the] network remains in its desired state.

With so many diverse devices requiring configuration and maintenance across an enterprise network, when problems occur, they can result in outages that directly hinder the ability to drive business operations. But being able to quickly design workflows, onboard devices, test and deploy your network using automation is one of the ways that enterprises can benefit from using network automation with AI-powered orchestration.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.