Itential has announced Automation Gateway, its purpose-built offering to propel enterprise network automaton and further accelerate network programmability. Itential’s ‘Bring Your Own Automation’ capabilities enable network teams to seamlessly integrate their existing automation efforts and transform scripts into APIs for use in end-to-end network automation workflows within Itential’s Automation Platform.
Over 60 percent of enterprise organizations still utilize an ad-hoc manual and reactive script-based approach to automation, according to upcoming research from Enterprise Management Associates. As network operations moves toward a more software-defined approach, network engineers need to incorporate their existing infrastructure while keeping pace with the adoption of new technologies, without having to sacrifice their current operational uptime.
Itential’s Automation Gateway utilizes existing investments in network configuration tools and network change scripts to propel network automation projects by incorporating their current efforts into a holistic approach. By implementing an automation solution that can integrate with customers’ existing ecosystem, network teams can focus on expanding automation efforts across multi-domain networks to enable greater network agility in support of current and future digital business requirements.
These capabilities within Itential’s Automation Platform enables out of the box support for all types of scripts from Python, C, Bash, Perl, and Ansible Playbooks; providing an integrated and centralized view of all automation efforts for use within the Itential Automation Platform; and dynamic discovery of scripts, providing a centralized and globally available repository within the Itential Automation Platform for enabling script execution in automation workflows via defined group-based access controls for end-to-end network automation.
The ability to ‘decorate’ or enhance scrips to enable and enforce consistent schema definitions and normalize scripts for standardized and repeatable API consumption, further driving network programmability.
Additionally, Itential’s latest release includes advanced event-driven automation capabilities for performing closed-loop activities. Itential’s event-driven automation capabilities can trigger automation task based upon notifications from several event systems such as Kafka or NETCONF, ensuring constant network configuration, assurance and compliance and automatically remediating known issues without the need for manual interaction. Itential’s closed-loop automation capabilities simplify network troubleshooting and eliminates common manual errors, further increasing network agility.
Itential Network Automation Platform can be used by developers and network engineers alike regardless of network engineering knowledge or code writing capabilities. It’s intuitive low-code development interface and built-in network intelligence allows everyone on the team to contribute to network automation goals.
Its built-in network intelligence empowers application developers with little or no network knowledge; low-code development interface enables network engineers without application development backgrounds; and standards compliant data structures and open APIs allow large teams to develop network automation workflows.
“In an effort to migrate from the CLI, the level of innovation in the network domain is being developed at a pace we have not experienced previously and organizations are struggling with how to rationalize their existing investments and start moving beyond scripting to modern network automation” said Chris Wade, CTO Itential. “Itential enables NetOps teams to move toward more modern automation techniques with an API driven approach without having to rip and replace or start from scratch.”
