Automation Strategy

Why Networks are Critical for Digital Transformation Success

Rich Martin

Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential

Why Networks are Critical for Digital Transformation Success
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Posted on July 29, 2021

The simple days of the network being a commodity and managed as “just the pipes” is over. Today’s modern network must be as agile to deploy and change as the other technologies it supports. Since digital transformation cannot occur without a strong network to support it, today’s businesses require a network that can quickly adjust to evolving requirements that enable new services, processes, and models. 

The network is the core to digital transformation.


Shifting from Bottleneck to Strategic Partner

Network teams have to keep up with the speed of business to help drive new and differentiated services by adopting vendor agnostic automation in order to utilize all technologies both old and new. It’s imperative that the network team is no longer seen as the bottleneck to innovative new services, but instead becomes a strategic partner to leverage to help the business achieve their goals.

The Importance of Becoming a Strategic Partner for Innovation
Historically, the network is seen as the bottleneck to innovation instead of a strategic partner within IT. Most network teams are viewed as slow to change and reactive as opposed to a strategic enabler. The reality is that their toolsets have been holding them back from being able to keep up with the speed of business as well as the reliance on time consuming manual processes.

But, the network will have to become a strategic partner for innovation and digital transformation. They must become capable of driving new and differentiated services for the business with operational readiness to support digital transformation efforts. The only true way to make this a reality is by successfully adopting network automation. organizations can re-think the way they traditionally manage their networks in order to optimize network and infrastructure operations, lower costs, and simplify and/or increase agility in an effort to support new levels of innovation and company growth.


Network Automation Solutions Should Embrace:

  • API-First Approach – As network infrastructure continues to evolve to become more programmable and treated as software, it is critical that organizations evolve their existing CLI-based automations with APIs.
  • Automation Analytics – Organizations need the ability to make informed decisions about which network automation use cases will drive the most value to their digital transformation initiatives.
  • Self-Service Capabilities – The core of digital transformation is enabling internal teams and customers with the ability for on-demand self-service and network automation provides the platform to easily do so.

Itential’s Approach to Self-Service Network Automation

At Itential, we understand and value the importance and necessity the network has on every business in today’s modern world. It’s imperative that network teams have the ability to make changes in real-time all while leveraging their existing tools and processes. The Itential Automation Platform was built to empower network teams to become a strategic partner with their IT counterparts in order to make an impact and help drive business goals and objectives forward.

Our low-code, drag-and-drop interface enables users to easily design, build, and visualize repeatable automation workflows. The Itential Automation Plaform provides the ability to safely and securely publish network automations to network and IT teams to enable self-service automation. By leveraging our out-of-the-box collection of Pre-Built Automations and Integrations, teams can rapidly adopt automations for any use case across any ecosystem so they can spend their time contributing to big project and initiatives instead of tedious tasks.

Our goal is to give teams the tools they need to become a strategic partner to innovative growth, instead of being bogged down by repetitive tasks.


Rich Martin

Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential

Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.

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