SD-WAN vendor Masergy took a step closer to making AI-powered network automation a reality with the launch of AIOps, a digital assistant that it claims will identify opportunities for networking, security, and application optimization.
While you probably won't be chatting up your holographic network lackey, ala Ironman and Jarvis, any time soon, that doesn't mean artificial intelligence (AI) can't do some of the heavy lifting.
Masergy is billing AIOps as a virtual engineer that lives in Masergy's Intelligent Service Control dashboard. Sadly, no word on whether it will include a Clippy-esq caricature complete with khaki shorts, horn-rimed glasses, and a pocket protector.
In the initial release, AIOps will mine data using a combination of anomaly detection and predictive analytics to surface relevant data and recommendations for how customers can improve application performance, predict bandwidth needs, and optimize network throughput.
AIOps is built on nearly 20 years of network behavior and optimization data gathered from enterprise customers around the globe, said Paul Ruelas, director of network products at Masergy, in an email to SDxCentral. “This uniquely positions Masergy AIOps to know what works and how to do it when it comes to optimizing a customer's network and application performance."
According to Masergy, AIOps has the potential to significantly reduce downtime, enable faster fault recovery, and reduce the time to resolution for troubleshooting.
One of AIOps most basic capabilities will be to help customers predict when they are likely to exceed the available bandwidth in the future, said Ruelas. "This is not some basic threshold alert, letting the user see that a circuit hit a particular bandwidth,” he said. “These are sophisticated algorithms that allow for predictive notification of a future network state.”
AIOps for now is limited to making recommendations, Masergy wants to expand its capabilities into the realm of what was once thought to be science fiction soon enough.
“We have some one-click fixes now and our goal is to eventually make some fixes require no human intervention,” Ruelas said. “Future revisions will allow for the AI to automatically take corrective action based on historical events and past user input.”
Masergy is also looking to expand to new models including managed security, network visibility and control, and two-way integrations via the company's Cisco-based unified communication-as-a-service (UCaaS) platform and other third-party collaboration tools.
“We expect to deliver fully autonomous networking to global enterprises in the next few years, and the launch of Masergy AIOps moves us firmly in the direction of our vision,” said Chris MacFarland, executive chairman and CTO of Masergy.