How Corning is Scaling
with Itential’s Automation & Orchestration Platform
Industry: Manufacturing • 
Employees: 10,000 • 
Annual Revenue: $12 B
Challenge
Corning needed to modernize thousands of network devices across its global sites but faced limited staff capacity, fragmented tools, and inconsistent processes.
Solution
By adopting Itential, Corning unified workflows, integrated with their entire ecosystem, and empowered teams with self-service orchestration.
Outcome
They scaled global network changes without adding headcount, improving compliance, reducing errors, and enabling faster, more consistent deployments.
Powering a World of Innovation Through Materials Science
Corning is a global leader in materials science with more than 10,000 employees and over $12 billion in annual revenue. Renowned for its innovations in glass, ceramics, and optical physics, Corning’s technologies enable advancements across industries – from consumer electronics to telecommunications.
Supporting this innovation is a global network infrastructure spanning a wide range of environments and technologies. In support of its long-term infrastructure strategy, Corning’s network team initiated a multi-year program to refresh 3,000 to 5,000 network devices across its global footprint by 2030.
With a fixed staffing model and a complex, multi-vendor environment, the team sought a strategic solution to improve operational efficiency, ensure consistency, and scale its efforts – without expanding headcount. Corning selected Itential’s network orchestration and automation platform to help standardize workflows, streamline change management, and integrate with existing systems.
Limited Staff & Complex Network Needs
Corning’s network infrastructure spans a diverse landscape of manufacturing facilities, research centers, and corporate campuses – each with unique operational needs and a wide range of network technologies in place. To support the company’s long-term strategy, the network team was tasked with refreshing thousands of devices globally by 2030.
This initiative introduced several key challenges:
Staffing Constraints
Corning’s fixed resource model made scaling manual processes for thousands of device changes unsustainable without adding headcount.
Inconsistent Processes
Custom scripts varied by region and team, making automation hard to scale consistently.
Tool Fragmentation
Multiple platforms (ITSM, Source of Truth, IPAM, Configuration monitoring) weren’t integrated, creating slow, risky workflows.
Operational Risk & Compliance
Manual steps and lack of standardization led to configuration drift, inconsistent deployments, and compliance gaps across sites.
To stay on track for the 2030 refresh goal and improve overall network reliability, Corning needed a platform that could orchestrate change at scale while integrating seamlessly with its existing tools and processes.
Evaluating Build vs Buy for Network Automation
As part of their strategic planning, Corning’s network team conducted a thorough evaluation of potential paths to scale their automation efforts. The goal was to identify an approach that could accelerate device refresh, reduce operational overhead, and align with the team’s existing skills and tooling.
Several options were considered:
Custom-Built Solutions
Using Open-Source Tooling & Services Firms
While this approach offered flexibility, it presented significant challenges related to ongoing maintenance, skill set gaps, and total cost of ownership. The complexity and overhead required to support a fully custom solution made it difficult to justify long-term.
Commercial Automation Platforms
Requiring In-House Development
Some offerings required heavy investment in high-code resources to build and maintain workflows. Given Corning’s fixed team size and limited developer staffing within the network organization, this approach was not sustainable.
Generic IT Orchestration Tools
While capable in traditional IT contexts, these platforms lacked the network-specific capabilities required to manage complex infrastructure across Corning’s environment. Limitations in protocol support, topology awareness, and integration with network tooling made these options less viable.
A Clear Choice
Through this analysis, it became clear that
Corning required a platform purpose-built for network automation and orchestration.
One that could work across a multi-vendor environment, integrate with existing systems, and support both low-code and high-code automation use cases.
Automation, Orchestration, & Data Transformation with Itential
Following a comprehensive evaluation, Corning selected Itential as the orchestration platform best suited to meet the company’s operational and strategic requirements. Itential provided a unified solution that could integrate with Corning’s existing toolsets, scale automation across a global network footprint, and support both current and future use cases.
Key factors in the decision included:
- Out-of-the-box integrations with Corning’s ecosystem of platforms, including network and cloud systems, ITSM ticketing, IPAM, configuration management, chatbot, automations, and more.
- A visual, low-code workflow builder that enabled network teams, regardless of programming background, to create, maintain, and manage automations.
- Support for high-code automation assets, ensuring Corning could continue leveraging investments in existing scripts and toolchains.
- Native ServiceNow application, enabling full lifecycle change management through Corning’s established ITSM processes, from request initiation to final approval
- Centralized governance to ensure consistency in how network changes – such as SD-WAN deployments or campus refreshes – are rolled out across diverse environments.
- Chatbot integration that enabled site leads and operational staff to initiate predefined workflows through a self-service interface, improving responsiveness and reducing dependency on core network engineers.
With Itential, Corning gained the ability to orchestrate the complete network change lifecycle, incorporating automated pre- and post-change validation to improve compliance, reduce errors, and streamline delivery across the organization.
Itential has given us the ability to take a consistent, scalable approach to network automation across our global environment. By integrating with our existing tools and simplifying the way we manage change, we’re able to execute on a large-scale refresh initiative while staying within our current staffing model.
Chris Healy | Director of LAN/WAN – Campus, Corning
How Itential Works for Corning
Itential is now in active use by Corning’s network team to streamline operations across campus refreshes, SD-WAN deployments, and day-to-day network changes. The platform has been integrated into existing workflows and tools to improve efficiency, maintain consistency, and scale automation efforts globally.
Visual Workflow Builder
Corning’s engineers use Itential’s drag-and-drop interface to create and manage standardized workflows for common activities such as device onboarding, VLAN modifications, and SD-WAN configuration. These workflows reduce manual effort and ensure repeatability across global sites.
ITSM Integration
Through Itential’s integration, change requests and approvals are automated and aligned with Corning’s established ITSM processes. This integration enables full lifecycle change tracking, from initiation through implementation and validation.
Data Transformation & Governance
Itential enables Corning to standardize configurations across multiple vendors – including network and cloud – by abstracting device-specific logic into repeatable templates. Automated compliance checks and version control ensure adherence to policy and reduce configuration drift.
Scalability Across the Environment
The platform supports automation at scale, allowing Corning to manage network changes across thousands of devices without increasing operational headcount. This has proven essential in supporting the company’s 2030 refresh objectives while operating within a fixed staffing model.
The Business Impact of Network Automation
With Itential, Corning has established a scalable automation and orchestration framework that enables the team to execute its network transformation strategy more efficiently—without increasing operational resources. By standardizing workflows and integrating automation into existing systems, Corning is able to accelerate delivery, reduce risk, and improve consistency across its global network environment.
As Corning continues executing its device refresh strategy and maturing its approach to network automation, the foundation established with Itential positions the team to expand into additional use cases. With orchestration, governance, and self-service now integrated into daily operations, the network team is well equipped to support future initiatives – such as scaling SD-WAN deployments and broader infrastructure modernization efforts – with greater consistency, agility, and control.
Key Outcomes:
Improved Productivity
Automation reduces the manual workload associated with routine network changes, allowing engineers to focus on higher-value initiatives and architectural improvements.
Faster Time to Value
Pre-built integrations with over 300+ systems to streamline implementation, reducing the need for custom development and enabling faster deployment of new services.
Stronger Compliance and Quality Controls
Automated validation and enforcement of configuration standards help minimize drift and ensure consistency across diverse vendor environments.
Operational Self-Service
Site leads and operations staff can initiate specific network changes – such as VLAN updates – through an integrated chatbot interface, reducing turnaround time and support dependency.
Learn More with Itential Content
Blogs
- From Consumer to Producer: Why It’s Time for a New Era in Network Automation
- Innovating Healthcare IT with Network Automation at RUSH University Medical Center
- Network Engineering Should Be a Standard, Not an Art
- How a Global Biotech Company Standardized Network Automation to Eliminate Errors & Enable Safe, Secure Self-Service
- Multi-Vendor Network Security: From Backlog to Blocking as a Service
- Gartner® Hype Cycle for I&O Automation Highlights Shift Towards “Automation-First” & Need for Broader Orchestration
- More Impact, Same Effort: Orchestrating Your Automations
Other Resources
- Orchestrate Your Network Automations: Building Workflows to Integrate with your IT Ecosystem (NFD 36)
- How to Connect ServiceNow to Your Infrastructure with Itential
- Gartner® Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration Tools
- Building Compliance Rules for Ordered Lists in CLI Configurations with Itential
- Packet Pushers: From Automation to Orchestration for a FinTech Network
- Network Automation & Orchestration Evaluation Guide