3 Customer Stories That Helped Shape Avi Networks
In the past couple of years, I’ve had a chance to speak with over 150 customers about our technology and their use cases. These incredible teams, at the front lines of IT, are our partners in innovation. I’ve learned some surprising things from them, even some that I considered counter-intuitive at the time — but they’ve helped us build what customers are truly asking for.
As we count down the days to our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, I want to tell you three short stories that have had a profound impact on what we’re doing.
First Story — Empowering Users
I was visiting the Head of Network Infrastructure at a large, global bank whom I assumed would want incredible levels of control over what his developers could and could not do. To my surprise, his big ask was, “Tell me how I can take myself out of the Provision-Scale-Tune loop. I want to create safe ‘sandboxes’ for my developers and users, so they can innovate and operate freely without having to worry about adversely affecting the rest of the team.”
So, one of our design principles is that networking technology needs to enable self-service. We want to empower, not inhibit users. Today Avi Networks is a key part of “Increase Developer Efficiency” initiatives with several enterprises.
Second Story — The Appeal of Generalists
One of my initial chats was with the CIO of a large public e-commerce company. My curiosity was piqued when he told me he didn’t want staff experts who are “an inch wide and a mile deep.” Instead, he wanted smart, innovative generalists who could focus on the big problems. “I have every tool under the sun, whether for performance or visibility or acceleration,” he said. “But I don’t have folks who understand these tools. I can’t attract that kind of specialized talent, and it’s too expensive.”
Today, a big part of our mission is to mask technical complexities from the user by engineering solutions that are not only “intelligent,” but intuitive and exceedingly simple to use. And simple is not easy. Simple is the removal of everything except what matters, and that takes longer and is much, much harder to do.
Third Story — Harnessing Machines to Connect the Dots
Actually, this is more of a question than a story: can machines be smarter than humans? If you’re diagnosing an illness or making a hiring decision, humans can be far superior. But often machine intelligence can result in more rapid decision making and greater efficiency. For example, Facebook’s custom-made load balancing controller is a prime example of technology integrating and automating multiple product silos to leverage the powers of synergy, where the end result is greater than the sum of its parts.
What if machines could take over certain tasks and perform integrated and intelligent, closed-loop operations that make these tasks faster, more efficient and devoid of human error? What if the power of this approach was available and consumable by all — not just the web-scale datacenter operators? We consider this a worthy challenge.
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At Avi Networks, we’re not in pursuit of incremental change. We’re inspired to create revolutionary solutions that create opportunity and value for our customers.
We’ve been dropping hints for a few months now. It’s almost time for the big reveal. Bookmark www.avinetworks.com and sign up for more details as we launch!
Originally published at https://blog.avinetworks.com.
