Holly Holcomb • 00:09

Hi, and welcome to our webinar. My name is Holly Holcomb, Program Director for Strategic Accounts here at Itential, and I am so excited to talk about this topic with Ankit Bansali today. It’s a conversation that we have a lot with our customers, and I can’t wait to dig into some of the details with you guys and talk a little bit about where we see the industry moving in terms of operating models and then the different distinct personas and perceptions from the folks that are in the field. So without further ado, Ankit, I guess let’s dig in.

Ankit Bhansali • 00:46

Let’s dig in. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you.

Holly Holcomb • 00:56

Awesome, so Ankit, before we dig into the different operating models, I’d really love for us to just talk through the progression that we’re seeing with our customers. And I would also love to get your take on ticket-driven operations, like what are you seeing with customers? What does this feel like today? How are builders managing this process?

Ankit Bhansali • 01:20

Absolutely, Holly. And before we get too deep into this conversation, I want to call it out. Again, this is a journey and we respect each operating model. Each one has its own value for that organization. It’s not about doing right or wrong. It’s just showing you guys there’s a better way to do something. And there’s a natural progression when it comes to maturity. So let’s start where most journeys begin, right? And we talked to a shy about sharing because they want to share and solve problems with us. So ticket driven operations. I mean, as the name suggests, it’s mostly ticket is the king here. Everything is tracked in a ticket. Every change is locked in a ticket. It gives organization that structural capability and accountability. It also brings that audit trail. But everything is very much ticketed where you need something, you have to open a ticket. And that’s how we see when it comes to folks delivering that kind of ticket based operations. What do you think about that?

Holly Holcomb • 02:24

So what does that mean for automation like is there automation at the stage? Is it like everybody’s doing it or what’s going on?

Ankit Bhansali • 02:32

So it’s not necessarily automation in the backside of the ticket concept It’s it’s mostly work is done manually Where if you need something you’re going to open up a ticket and the team of engineers going to figure it out And on on how to solve that problem at the same time they will pick and select the tools They might have at hand, but usually everything is done through manually By logging into systems and and making sure ticket is up-to-date it after they are done with that work Okay, so in terms of delivery time I have to still wait for somebody to manually make the change on the network But at the very least it’s being tracked in a ticket. Is that right? That is correct Those are the the benefits you get from this operation where you bring in your tickets Our team will focus on delivering those Tickets with with whatever manual way of logging into system updating the records and bring that information back into the ticket So what if I need more than one network resource though?

Holly Holcomb • 03:32

What if I need a bit but I also need an a record are those all separate tickets?

Ankit Bhansali • 03:38

Everything will be individualized which means every request has its own ticket and its own separate manual process behind us So the short answer is yes You

Holly Holcomb • 03:48

So as if I were an app developer and I’m coming to you as the, you know, for a network service or resource, this still seems kind of like a slow delivery time and maybe not the best user experience.

Ankit Bhansali • 04:02

I mean, yes, I have to accept that from your statement. It is true that the experience from a user end is not that good, and especially with the delivery time, with all the manual work that’s been done behind the scene. But that is very true. Yes, it’s going to take much more time. But how about I tell you that we try to reduce the time of delivery by bringing in some automation, and let me show you a better operating model that at least help me deliver things faster.

Holly Holcomb • 04:31

Okay, I’m interested. Let’s go.

Ankit Bhansali • 04:33

So the second one I’m focusing on, this is where we see folks also line up is, at this stage, the team wants to automate, and they want to bring some automation in their ticketing process. So when you come in and create a ticket, that the amount of time an engineer would take to log into a system, capture that information, make changes, and then try to tell you that that service is completed, is basically being automated. So I think what I’m trying to go here with is, by bringing some automations with the ticketing process, I would believe the time to delivery is much faster. So that way, I think you can get a better experience. What do you think about this from your perspective?

Holly Holcomb • 05:18

I think that this sounds a little bit better. So I know that one experience that, if I’m putting on my app developer hat, one experience that I’ve seen in the past is that I’ll make a request on a ticket and for one reason or another, the ticket gets declined or rejected. Maybe I put the period in the wrong place or something like that, or I’m requesting a very specific configuration and I guess that’s not something that our network team supports. Like what does that mean in this particular operating model?

Ankit Bhansali • 05:52

I mean, I see where you’re going, but the idea here is we’re trying to build some cruise control in this automation process, but you’re still missing that framework to operationalize it in a very consumer-friendly way. So I agree that we are trying to put automation that is trying to save time from a provisioning standpoint, but everything is still need to be communicated back and sources of truth need to be separately then updated. So I agree to your point that the experience you’re getting is not much different, but it’s gonna be slightly better with the speed.

Holly Holcomb • 06:36

So, if I were to look at these fancy progress bars on the bottom of this slide, what you’re saying is that from a process perspective, we’re getting a little bit more standard. It’s not just a human manually doing it, and it doesn’t depend on, you know, John versus Joe implementing the change. There’s some degree of automation in place that’s hopefully standardizing the process. In terms of delivery, because the automations, they’re actually implementing the change on the network, maybe we’re getting a little bit closer to a standardized delivery as well. And I think it got marginally better. I didn’t see much of a move, but it got marginally better on the time to delivery. So it seems like things are getting slightly better, but it also still seems like I’m having to open up multiple tickets, right?

Ankit Bhansali • 07:23

I mean, you’re 100% correct. Your experience didn’t get better. It was like, we brought automation in the picture. It’s like automation is like putting power tools in the toolbox.

Holly Holcomb • 07:33

Wait, so your life got better, but my life didn’t change, I think that’s what I just heard.

Ankit Bhansali • 07:39

Absolutely, because every team uses them differently from an automation standpoint, right? And the realization is basically that’s going to lead us to the next step is how do we understand automations and conform it to a service? So now I think what I can think of is I can try to eliminate you creating six tickets for six different requests and maybe offer something from a service concept. I think maybe transitioning into the next operating model will give you some kind of belief that we are also focusing on customer experience. And I think we want you guys to have a better experience. So let me let me talk about this product driven shared understanding operating model. This is where things level up to be honest. It is is slightly more mature than your ticketing and automation kind of conversation So this is where I think when I when I when I want to offer something as a service. I’m gonna offer f5 You since you brought up VIP. I’m gonna offer f5 VIP as a service So it’s much more standardized from a delivery standpoint And this way you you open at least Couple of tickets to to to get this service moving along because you might need to also Collaborate with other team members on how to provision this, right?

Ankit Bhansali • 09:01

so they might be couple of tickets you might have to do and you might have to have the understanding of of Providing information on what service you might need So I think this eliminates your ticketing creation like from let’s say six tickets to at least two ticket and you get a better Experience if that helps how about this from a from a process change?

Holly Holcomb • 09:22

This does seem marginally better. I do see that I no longer have to open up multiple tickets, that you’re formalizing what I can request that gets me a little bit closer to the outcomes that I’m requesting. I agree. It does seem like in terms of delivery too, instead of me having to open up all those tickets, you’ve done some of that work for me too, which has helped the time to delivery. I know that in the past, there’s been some degree of friction whenever I request one resource from one team and another resource from another team and interoperability between those. So it also sounds like you’re kind of doing some of the legwork on the backend to make it so that I no longer have to deal with that friction, that these are all standard services that go together in a single product that I can just request.

Ankit Bhansali • 10:12

Correct. We are focusing on the packaging when you’re trying to make a cake mix or something. We are packaging the flour, the sugar, the eggs, all in a single basket, but you still have to understand what you’re trying to order from that perspective. So to answer to your question, yes, this is where I’m thinking.

Holly Holcomb • 10:29

Okay. So one issue that I’ve run into though is sometimes Like just as an example, I’ll request a VIP and Usually you guys will come back to me and you’ll say okay Well, you can either have this configuration on an f5 device or this other configuration on a Citrix device and which one makes the most sense and like Really? I don’t want to be a SME in F5 versus Citrix versus another type of load balancer like that just feels like a lot of information That I need to focus on my application and making it the best application. It can be So, what about that? I still have to do all of that in this particular offering?

Ankit Bhansali • 11:10

I mean, you did hit one of the nerves here, which is, yes, I’m expecting you to be a very smart consumer, where I need you to know what you want. I can automate and formalize the process from a service delivery standpoint, but I have expectations from you that you need to know which WIP you’re ordering, which region it needs to be deployed in, which application it should come with when you’re deploying that WIP. So, maybe there’s certain firewalls that you might also need to add along the way, which I’m expecting you to know because the way I’m seeing in this scenario is you’re not just the requester from a consumer standpoint, you’re also the owner and the architect of that service. So, this is in line with that expectation that you come with a lot of understanding of the infrastructure of the organization, and you have an absolute understanding of the services you might need to actually make this a workable solution.

Holly Holcomb • 12:11

I’m just going to put it out there that when I go into AWS, they do not force me to know what the hardware or vendor is under the hood. I just get to request the thing that I want, and I can focus on the things that I want to focus on, which are building my application.

Ankit Bhansali • 12:24

I mean…

Holly Holcomb • 12:28

You get better, you get closer to the goal, I’m just saying it’s still not quite perfect.

Ankit Bhansali • 12:35

As much as it sounds that easy to deliver something like that, it’s hard to deliver a service from a product mindset. So what you’ve been layering up is the idea of a product mindset. When I request a product, I know exactly what I want from a product perspective, I do not care what the services encompass behind the product. I think this is where you’re going from your experience. What is your ideal experience going to be before I go into the next model?

Holly Holcomb • 13:07

That is the ideal experience. And I would also love to have that ideal experience without the cost of cloud, please.

Ankit Bhansali • 13:13

So if you could just figure out a way to give that experience to me without having the giant Public cloud bill that comes with it. That would be wonderful Okay So so far what we did is we described a lot of services right and now we put the onus on the customer or the consumer To understand what services they need to request and we have made some automation So I’m sure the service time to delivery is much faster There’s much more standardized process and all the good bits around automation, right? what we are missing so far when you set a cloud like experience is the Orchestration of the services and and by exposing that as a single product interface So I think where you’re going towards is if you want a cloud like experience You need to be able to orchestrate these services But at the same time have that single interface of ordering that product So I think product is something that simplifies this experience and Consumers don’t have to wait and and be that knowledgeable so it makes it even easier for them to keep ordering these kind of product and And the intelligence is baked in the orchestration layer with with service orchestration behind the scene So I think what you’re asking is I want cloud like experience Even though it may be the assets or the product might be living in different on-prem or on cloud But the product is what you want and you do not really care how people deliver or or build build the internal solution But just make it so good so easy to consume that you get a cloud like experience. Is that what you’re asking?

Holly Holcomb • 14:50

That’s exactly what I’m asking.

Ankit Bhansali • 14:51

Okay. So let me walk through this cloud-like operating model. Since you talked about the friction, it’s not just the friction, it’s the onus we are putting on the customer to understand a lot and everything behind the scene in the organization, which is a lot to be honest. When you’re going to have multi-domain, you talked about F5 with provisioning and deployment from, just application deployment goes through load balancer, firewall, bunch of things that go around with it. So if you want to do an application deployment, you’re going to do five services. If you want a cloud-like experience, I have a product called Application Deployment. You fill in the basic information you need to provide from your understanding without understanding the infrastructure details. So I think this is where I think.

Ankit Bhansali • 15:41

People want that capability and they aspire to be there. I think what we can do is, and we definitely have talked to a lot of customers, and I think we can provide you that Cloud-like experience, that one-click everything experience, that magic button experience, especially with our Lifecycle Manager application, because that is what brings that Cloud-like operating model. Did I really Come up with with this model which kind of goes towards that delivery concept where you are ordering product and not services Is that where you were going with your your?

Holly Holcomb • 16:22

customer request experience Yeah, yeah I think especially when I look at all of the different attributes of that particular operating model the time to delivery is much faster it’s almost immediate because it’s no longer waiting for people to look at tickets or update tickets or Implement based on data that is provided from another team. It’s streamlined The work has been done on the back end not only to define what the product is that I’m going to consume But also make sure that that definition aligns with not only security standards, but the standard offering that my team even wants to support All of that. I think all that work has been done and has made it a much more seamless experience internal user experience To make sure that when I want to innovate when I want to build something new a new application That’s going to be you know helping us. You know generate revenue within the company That I don’t have to try and model through The network specific resources to understand how to get from point A to point B So I couldn’t agree more. I know that we’ve talked a lot about the provisioning motion, but one thing that we haven’t talked a ton about is all of the updates once it’s been provisioned. Then I have to go hunt through tickets to try and figure out what I requested last week or a month ago or six months ago just to get something to be updated.

Ankit Bhansali • 17:51

Okay. Now you’re really asking Cloud-like experience with Cloud-like features. I think this is where exactly Lifecycle Manager really shines. It’s a framework that ties to a lot of things you’ve discussed and you position from a customer experience, and managing not just the actions but the outcomes with it, and providing that self-service capability. Because we are used to seeing in Cloud where somebody logs in, they see all their products that are available to them, but also all the services they have provisioned, and all the actions they can take on those services. So I think it takes the consistency of products and the simplicity of the Cloud. I think that makes it real for both our data center customers, Cloud customers that they can offer Cloud-like experience, that matching button, that matching portal, which you’ve been talking about, which I’m happy to cover in the next slide.

Holly Holcomb • 18:49

Sounds great. All right, so we’ve been talking about operating models so far, kind of macro taking a step back and thinking about where we see our customers and how they’re navigating the progression over time of just strictly tracking tickets of network changes all the way to providing a service or product to their internal users that really reduces how much they have to understand about what they’re requesting and just gives them the very specific functional and technical requirements they need to do their job. So let’s take a step in and do the micro perspective. I know we’ve been going back and forth of Holly as the application developer. So here’s Holly at the top of the diagram, who is really just trying to get the things that she needs to get her application out the door. And like we said before, each of the different domains, they may have some level of automation tooling, may not, they might rely on a UI to go in and actually perform some degree of automation, whether it’s through a controller, that type of thing. But individual tickets, individual network resources, and then Holly Holcomb is responsible for trying to compile them all together and make sure that I didn’t make a mistake along the way.

Holly Holcomb • 20:06

So help me out here, Ankit. What are we saying is the right path forward?

Ankit Bhansali • 20:12

So absolutely, and this diagram is beautifully representative of the current situation when you do not have services or product mindset, and you gladly pointed out that I need to understand my request in terms of what I really want, and you have to open individual tickets. So this is going back to your ticketing operating model with some automations around it, right? And what we see is we give, folks, and this is Itential customers too, we give them the flexibility to write automations in per domain and we layer that with the ticket if you want to start something really quick and easy way of bringing automation and ticketing process around it. So it definitely does not cover the service, the product portion of things, but it goes in line with the ticketing and the minimum automation that goes with the ticketing process. So I agree with you based on what you said, you still need to do this because you haven’t actually had the product mindset behind it.

Holly Holcomb • 21:09

All right, well, I guess let’s take it from ticket driven and network service driven all the way over to product mindset. So what does that same paradigm shift look like that we were talking about with the operating models that were really around creating internal products for your internal users? What does that look like in practice?

Ankit Bhansali • 21:30

Yeah, so initially we talked about how tickets and everything is siloed and you have to do a lot of swivel sharing to get that information back to your ticket. And update your sources of truth. Now we have kind of had the idea based on like the trends people see in the tickets generated. They wanna formalize that process and do a lot of service based concept. So you now have to focus on what is a service definition which I can provide. And there’s flexibility on two things, especially if you choose this kind of a design with Itential. Your engineering team now gets the ability to pick and choose the technology of their choice, which means if I’m good with Python, I can bring in my Python script and then I can expose it as a service.

Ankit Bhansali • 22:14

So what I’m doing right now is letting people build their own service definition per domain without having to actually understand the behind the scene concept. But you still have to have that product owner that takes all of those independent services which can be run the way they like from a backend perspective, but still be able to architect those services into a product like mindset. And that is still something missing even further down the line, which I think LCM solves, because I think that’s where we really shine is, is giving the product owners to build their product definitions with all the distributed services their teams provide without having to worry about the backend implementation of it. So I think that provides you a lot of value once you shift from no product mindset to services to real product mindset. Yeah.

Holly Holcomb • 23:09

I know that we had a recent conversation with a customer and he’s trying to replicate this very same operating model with all of his teams. And the idea and notion is that each of them are the SMEs on their very specific products and they should be defining what the standardized services are that are going to feed into the products that are offered to your internal customers. And those services aren’t just the provisioning or create. It’s the full CRUD operations that we see our customers building their services around. For years, our customers have already been building orchestration that represents the CRUD operations. They’ve already been building orchestrations that create network assets. They already build orchestrations that update them or release or delete them from the network.

Holly Holcomb • 24:01

And the real thing that has been missing is how to take all of those CRUD operations and put them together into a product framework that also tracks the output or the outcomes from those orchestrations.

Ankit Bhansali • 24:15

I see. I see. And I think you absolutely spot on here. Itential customers have been doing orchestration with services, but that idea, and they were doing those services by just thinking about individual action. They would have a create provisioning flow or modifying something specific where they will have to go to a lot of sources of truth to figure things out and then try to make a change and decommission and the process was there, but it was very disjointed. And I hear your point that people were doing that before, but with LCM, what I’m trying to make a case is when you’re thinking about lifecycle, now we’re thinking about lifecycle of the product with the intention of exactly what you had been doing before, but bringing all of those things together so it’s easy to manage and also let folks do self-service. So I hear you, Holly, and I think in the next slide, I’ll show you how easy it becomes once you adopt the lifecycle mentality.

Ankit Bhansali • 25:13

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. So what has happened so far is, to Holly’s point, we had customers already building these orchestrated services independently. They were doing lifecycle, but in a pseudo-lifecycle way. But there was a lot of heavy lifting that had to go to do it right. What we are trying to do with LCM is bring all that information together so you can pretty much use existing design, but still have those CRUD operations, which you talked about, Holly, along with that lifecycle. Because I keep telling folks this statement a lot of times.

Ankit Bhansali • 25:52

You’re going to provision one time, you’re going to delete one time. But all your OPEX costs is in day-to-day support to maintain the service credibility, to maintain the SLAs, to make sure services are delivered. This also gives other organizations to go and offer new services to existing customers. So bringing new ways of bringing in new revenue, making sure they can allow self-service for customers to own those changes for themselves without having to go through a lot of ticketing process to make a change on the network. Because with lifecycle, you have restricted the amount of change people can do on their own asset by providing that self-service. And I think, Holly, this is where you get the cloud-like experience and accountability is shifted back to the consumer side because the engineering team and the product team and the services team have already put all those guardrails in place with Lifecycle Manager.

Holly Holcomb • 26:53

Yeah, and especially when I think back to the conversation we were having earlier around making updates to something that maybe I requested six months ago, and the benefit that comes with having some notion of what Holly Holcomb requested and being able to just simply say update what I requested six months ago in a self-service interface rather than having to dig through a ticket or dig through sources of truth that have like the little tiny bread and crumbs that are going to help lead me to who exactly I need to actually put my request into. It is, it’s a substantially better experience. I think the other thing that we talk a lot with our customers about at this stage is around how having the definition clearly outlined inside of a lifecycle manager will help you also get a better feel for how to triage issues when they manifest on, you know, I’m sure that you’ve probably heard this before, Ankit, it’s probably the network that’s the problem. My application is never the problem and it’s probably the network. What happens when I reach out to you and I say, hey, the request that I made to you six months ago, for whatever reason, like the application’s gone down and I can’t get it to come back up. Can you help me figure out what’s wrong?

Ankit Bhansali • 28:10

Yep. Yep. No, absolutely. And this is where if we had the lifecycle mentality, right, we have encompassed all the data. So when you ordered a service, we exactly know what were the services provided in that product, which means now to your point. since everybody blames the network, we also need to support the NOC teams, that the service SLA teams are making sure the services are provided in a timely format, and especially with troubleshooting. I mean, how many times have we heard, like to your point, it’s the network’s fault.

Ankit Bhansali • 28:45

But without the right information, nobody can troubleshoot a service or a product. With this, now day two support can be so easy because I exactly know what Holly ordered six months ago, what she got delivered, and is it still running from a service standpoint? I can write troubleshooting day two actions and provide it to the NOC team, so they don’t have to figure out what did Holly ordered in the first place. So I think this just not gives you, this helps the organization to provide products faster with time to delivery, but I think it saves a ton of troubleshooting time to maintain the sanity and the SLAs around those services. So I think you will even get a better experience even when you have issues with your services, and there’ll be less finger pointing because we would exactly know which part of the service is failing because when we delivered the product, we know what were the services involved in the first place.

Holly Holcomb • 29:45

I’m going to toss another scenario at you, Ankit. What happens when I’ve got an application, and I know that it’s comprised of a bunch of different network resources, and then one of the teams listed below needs to do maintenance on the network resource that’s associated with my application? What happens in that situation, and how do we make sure that my application doesn’t go down?

Ankit Bhansali • 30:09

So this is where the outage ticket comes in, right? And this is a whole outage cycle on these. Usually, the customer reporting when they face these outages, because when folks are working in siloed teams, right? They do not really know which service is directly aligned with Holly’s service, right? They think about just upgrading as their function. But now what we can do is before they upgrade, they should be able to check if there are any services running on this device that are inclined to anything that’s customer related. So there’s two things they can do.

Ankit Bhansali • 30:47

So one, get the ability of understanding what services are running on that on those infrastructure.

Holly Holcomb • 30:54

So discovery.

Ankit Bhansali • 30:55

So discovery. Yes. And the other thing is making sure the customer is kept in loop when things change. So I can now have with that information, I can fire an email to you that you should be expecting outages now for that period because we are going in a maintenance mode. So now you’re more prepared and maybe you call them back saying, no, I really need my service for another day because I have very critical things that I’m doing for the next couple of days. How about you postpone that maintenance? Certainly now we can listen to our customers need and make sure our maintenance windows are aligned and information travels in a much structured way as compared to silo team doing upgrades without understanding the actual services that are running on those devices.

Ankit Bhansali • 31:42

Does that give you a surety in terms of how we make the experience not just better for organization but also making sure the customers are informed in a timely manner?

Holly Holcomb • 31:55

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that we’ve talked a lot in this slide and the previous slide about all of the different people and personas that we work with on a regular basis and we’ve talked about the value that bringing not just the product mindset but also the existing orchestrations, assets, and then being able to get more value out of them by applying Lifecycle Manager on top of it. I think we’ve talked enough about the individualized benefits. Let’s take a step back for a moment and talk about some of the business benefits that come with Lifecycle Manager and being able to manage all of your assets in a way that is more comprehensive and holistic. From the perspective of I won’t I won’t go into Holly application developer anymore but presumably the team that is building application logic the team that is actively trying to build out tooling for the organization they’re either doing it because they’re trying to reduce costs of some of some sort or they’re trying to enable revenue or it’s maybe it’s revenue generating the application is being able to deliver what they need in a quick cadence is Crucial for organizations to be agile and to be able to adapt to market conditions and demands at the speed that the application developers can can build it and get it ready to go so from a from a value perspective from a business value perspective

Ankit Bhansali • 33:26

Building a framework like what we’ve talked about today is really crucial to being agile and being able to deliver and react to market demands Quickly correct and and I mean engineering team gets their freedom of building things We have the product making sure the business side of the world can actually design products with lifecycle in mind and the value add is I mean at the end of the day you want new customers to deliver service faster You want to make sure if they run into hiccups? We can try to solve the problem faster by providing better troubleshooting cadence and in inform information and churn Right, we hear a lot of folks when they order these services. You want to make sure that experience is seamless and The only way they cannot churn is you keep providing informed information and services by meeting the SLA demands and being One step ahead of the customer’s experience because as an organization with with AI and teams involved that there is there is Much more better ways to consume in information where machine to machine can process information faster Which means which which means we can really be two steps ahead of the problem before we face one

Holly Holcomb • 34:38

And I know that we talked a lot about the day-two or operational side of a lifecycle manager and the value that that brings. A lot of what we’re having conversations around today is also around compliance. Oh, yeah. And being able to understand what needs to be in compliance, what doesn’t need to be in compliance, and what’s the scope. Tell us more about how resource models can help with that. Thanks a lot.

Ankit Bhansali • 35:05

I mean, this is the funny part, right? There’s never been something like Itential to be honest that run compliance on services where service can go really disparate, where the technology can be disparate, that the interfaces can be very different because we have APIs, we can run compliance on Linux boxes, Cisco devices, Arista, network elements, controllers, and usually services comprises of one of those technologies or all of the below technologies. So it is very much in the favor of the customer where they can build products and run compliance on product services, which is very unique coming from the same application. I’m sure people can do it, but then they would have to build another separate product or buy something to actually solve that compliance problem because guess what? I only do provisioning, but with Itential and LCM and all those adjacent applications of the platform, you can actually rely on Itential to make sure your SLAs are met and you can run compliance across the board to Holly’s point, which is very critical for businesses because they wanna make sure services are up and running. If they are out of compliance, can we identify them and can we make sure there’s a process to fix those problems?

Holly Holcomb • 36:27

And then from a proof collection perspective, a lot of times understanding what you need to actually collect proof on is defined by what it’s interacting with. Being able to go ahead and set up orchestration around collecting that proof based on what you’ve defined inside of your LCM saves tons and tons of time. So I know those are two great examples. Last one that we’ll call out here is what we talked about during the earlier part of the presentation that was all around helping kind of equalize and build parity between the experience of requesting network resources in cloud versus requesting network resources on your existing infrastructure that you’re hosting on-prem. Right. How, you know, tell us more about that. I mean, yeah, I mean cloud costs money and we all know is the experience is what we go for to spend that money. But we have organizations that are large. I mean, they own their own data centers. Right.

Ankit Bhansali • 37:26

So they can pretty much offer those resources internally. And we have a lot of customers who have already asked us. can we make sure that cloud-like experience, can we build it on top of our initial data centers? Because we don’t want everybody to go to Cloud directly without having the ability to not know what’s available to them. When you’re building this solution, Itential will make sure that when you build these services and these products, we will make sure if there is a way to go pick something that you guys already own from a resource standpoint within your data center, before going to the Cloud. Again, when we try to provision it, we keep that in mind. At the same time, when we try to decommission it, we will also keep that in mind. The resources come back and making sure they are available for the next rotation.

Ankit Bhansali • 38:19

With this, you can not just have the cloud-like experience for cloud-like products, but it can be cloud-like experience for any network services which you guys have currently in your on-prem data centers or in Cloud which you’re hosting right now. Yeah.

Holly Holcomb • 38:34

It’s all about ensuring that you guys get the full ROI on the existing infrastructure that you’ve already paid for, that you’ve already got posted, that you’re paying to maintain. It’s really about getting the ROI out of all of those network resources.

Ankit Bhansali • 38:47

Yeah, that was very important. So we’ve been talking to a lot of customers and we have kind of identified a few great examples, especially when it comes to lifecycle manager use cases. We have seen folks building these kind of use cases inside the platform, but with LCM, they can get even more value, especially with device lifecycle. And I mean, how many customers have how many devices? We know we have customers that have 80,000, 100,000 devices, right? So it’s very hard to manage just the basic lifecycle of those assets. So we’re going to go on how customers do it right now, and how we make it better and manageable with lifecycle, keeping all those nuances that go with the device lifecycle.

Ankit Bhansali • 39:27

The other portion is compliance that goes with each of these use cases. We know just making sure the device is up and running healthy, running the right version is not enough with the technologies we have right now. We want to make sure compliance is also baked in with that. We make sure that there’s compliance that make sure the configurations are in line along with the lifecycle of that device itself. There’s a lot of nuances that goes with device lifecycle, which we’ll cover in the demos. We’ll talk about compute infrastructure. Just provisioning a VM is no longer an acceptable norm.

Ankit Bhansali • 40:04

Customers want them to be managed just like device lifecycle, with all the nuances that goes around it, with how teams apply their services in day 0, day 1, and how a VM is also handoff to multiple teams for application and other kinds of firewall rule management around that VM. I think the most favorite one I have where you can go through OSI layers across the board from all the seven layers is Is application deployment lifecycle when you order an application? There is so much that goes behind the scene which is lost in translation Especially what if you’re not doing a product based concept with lifecycle manager you see those Advantages that come with using LCM at the same time, even though it’s a very complex problem You see how easy it is to maintain Not just from a provisioning standpoint, but all the data activities, which which Holly was alluding to before Is is the nuances that certificate rotation that goes with it? How do I have which firewall which I know need to update like there’s a lot of knock to Data support that goes with application deployment itself Certificate rotation. I think this is very critical for a lot of our customers They have a lot of devices a lot of and and with cyber security, right? every company is requested to follow certain standard to rotate that their certificates to be in compliant and And it’s a very big task and it with with the number of elements you have in the network It can even scale and be very daunting. So we’re going to cover that in our demos and something on network service life cycle. We talked about network elements, compute elements, application deployment, but there’s at the end of the day, you also want to make sure the network services are also kept in check, especially for DIA layer two, layer three, so we can get complicated with how network service life cycle goes around Itential platform.

Ankit Bhansali • 42:03

And what are the benefits you get out of the box by using LCM with Network Lifecycle Management, which is not just provisioning, and I keep going back to those attributes, it’s not provisioning, it’s one time only, it’s the day-to-day activities that making sure that services are kept in check, the SLAs are met, and how do you make sure it’s in compliance, so it comes with a lot of those nuances which usually people do it in a disparate way, but with LCM and the definition of a product-like concept, it makes it very much under a single umbrella. So Holly, I think that should give folks the idea where we are going with by providing new demos. Awesome.

Holly Holcomb • 42:43

Well, like Ankit said, stay tuned, and thank you guys for your time today, and thank you, Ankit, for all the insight.

Ankit Bhansali • 42:49

Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you, Holly. See you guys soon. See you.