TelecomNewsroom interview with Nikhil Vyakaranam, Product Marketing Manager, Anuta Networks

By Contributing Editor Anne Whealdon 

Nikhil Vyakaranam is Product Marketing Manager for Anuta Networks, a widely recognized innovator in multi-vendor network services automation for the branch, campus, data center and service provider-managed enterprise networks. Nikhil is responsible for the company’s product ATOM, which provides Assurance, Analytics, Compliance and Orchestration of Multi-Vendor networks. Nikhil has vast experience in Pre-Sales and Product Marketing across network automation and mobility portfolios. In his previous outings, he has worked with Cisco Systems and Nokia networks.

With ONUG Fall 2019 just around the corner, we sat down with Nikhil to discuss the company, the upcoming event and beyond. 

TelecomNewsroom, Anne Whealdon (TNR-AW) Question: Tell us about what you do and what problems Anuta Networks is solving.

Anuta Networks, Nikhil Vyakaranam (AN-NV) Answer:  IT networks are already very complex. 

The rise of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, the continuous creation of innovative applications and massive demand for bandwidth-consuming services such as streaming videos, gaming, and social media further complicate the network. Not to mention, 5G and edge computing, advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and the big data explosion are all leading to unprecedented levels of interconnections.

World wide network administrators are facing intense pressure to ensure a flexible, scalable, secure and predictable infrastructure. But the administrators have their hands tied. They are burdened with legacy devices, hybrid multi-cloud and multi-vendor infrastructure with differing capabilities, limited visibility and shrinking operational budgets.

At Anuta Networks, we uniquely address these pain points with our next-gen ATOM network automation and orchestration solution. Anuta ATOM delivers a modular, extensible, scalable and cloud-native software platform. It enables enterprises and service providers to rapidly design and provision network services, collect real-time telemetry, develop deep network analytics, ensure compliance and provide service assurance for multi-vendor physical and virtual infrastructure. With ATOM, networking teams can deliver services faster, eliminate human errors, avoid security violations, reduce OpEx and meet SLAs with exceptional high availability.

In short, Anuta Networks brings to you the network automation software that has helped grow the networks of web-scale companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon AWS.

TNR-AW Q: What is the one thing that differentiates Anuta Networks within the industry?

AN-NV A: Enterprises and Service Providers constantly see the need to automate their network services, and there are many solutions to help them build a network from scratch. However, they made an enormous investment in best-of-breed networking infrastructure from multiple vendors that they can’t afford to replace again and again. Plus, they can’t rely on niche players who automate network services for a specific use-case or vendor.

Anuta ATOM is the only solution that delivers network analytics, automation and assurance for existing multi-vendor (45+ vendors) physical and virtual infrastructure and automates all the use-cases. This includes Data Center Automation, InterCloud, Micro-Segmentation, Security as a Service, LBaaS, Campus/Access, Branch/WAN, Service Provider IP/MPLS Edge, Virtual CPE and NFV.

At Anuta Networks, we are a highly customer-focused company. We strive to service our customers’ requests promptly and without any compromise in the product quality. That’s one of our core strengths and differentiating factors – the speed and agility with which we can attend to customer desires. What helps us with this ability is that we are a small and lean company, unburdened with legacy technologies. We have a small, agile and highly talented engineering team that is made up of experts in building scalable, vendor-neutral and easy-to-use network automation solutions. Our product – ATOM – is built upon the latest cutting-edge technologies, which enables us to rapidly scale, extend and enhance the platform to cater to customer needs. The ease with which we can adapt to new technologies and deliver production-ready software in a few months is truly remarkable in our industry.

TNR-AW Q: What is Anuta Networks’ position on hybrid multi-cloud deployments for the enterprise?

AN-NV A: Hybrid multi-cloud deployments are a reality for most large organizations. Public clouds such as GCP, AWS and Azure help organizations be more agile and scale faster. Most organizations have adopted a hybrid multi-cloud strategy to some extent. Many companies that we have talked to have moved a significant part of their data center across the various public clouds. However, mission-critical and sensitive applications are still hosted in an on-prem private data center. 

A primary concern in a Hybrid Multi-cloud architecture is about how to monitor, manage, provision and enforce uniform compliance across the length and breadth of the network. With such a vast network and wide range of vendors – each having varied capabilities, communication, access methods and performance parameters – network operations become an uphill task. Adding to the organizations’ woes is the legacy infrastructure that they just cannot get rid of. 

The need of the hour is an automation solution that can provide a single pane of glass and a single source of truth for the entire network. We, at Anuta Networks, have recognized this glaring problem and our product – ATOM platform – aims to automate, orchestrate and simplify network operations and management of hybrid multi-cloud deployments with a zero-touch approach.

TNR-AW Q: How do you define digital transformation and what is Anuta Networks doing to help enterprise businesses adapt more effectively?

AN-NV A: To us, digital transformation is the use of technology to deliver a responsive business strategy and cultivate a culture of innovation. Digital transformation helps to enhance customer experience, reduce the time for service provisioning and improve the speed, reliability and security of the business. 

Digital transformation is driven by high-tech applications assisted by a robust and responsive IT network. The network has to be available and performant 24×7, and it has to match any spikes in demand while optimizing the overall cost to operate it. It has to be ready to support initiatives in smart and real-time applications increasingly hosted in multi-cloud environments. To achieve digital transformation, organizations need to standardize their procedures, enforce uniform and consistent policies across their entire IT network, closely monitor for noncompliance and instantly remediate any network issues. A predictable and reliable network is essential for a quick and sustained digital transformation.

The Anuta ATOM platform helps enterprises automate their network, thereby eliminating human errors and increasing network stability. The highly scalable ATOM platform can be a single source of truth and a single pane of glass for the entire network. It enables organizations to develop a uniform end-to-end policy across sites and geographies. With its closed-loop automation feature, the ATOM platform can automatically detect and remediate known issues. 

Thus, the ATOM platform accelerates the path to digital transformation.

TNR-AW Q: What are you looking to gain from participating in the ONUG Fall Conference?

AN-NV A: ONUG workgroups and the rest of the community are doing extraordinary work toward digital transformation. Many renowned individuals and esteemed organizations are participating in and leading this forum. Anuta Networks is an active participant in a couple of workgroups, and we closely monitor the industry trends and the forum’s progress.

At Anuta networks, we have been developing automation and orchestration products for more than eight years. By participating in ONUG Conferences, we wish to gain useful insights about technology evolution, as well as share our experiences and expertise with the community. 

We hope our participation not only helps ONUG accelerate its path toward digital transformation, but also helps us improve and evolve our technology as we actively work to delight our customers.

The ONUG board has done a tremendous job raising awareness about the challenges and best practices in Open Networking, and we are honored to be a part of this vibrant community.

TNR-AW Q: Thank you for the great insights, Nikhil. To learn more about Anuta Networks, please visit www.anutanetworks.com.  To register for the ONUG Fall 2019 event, please click here.