Guest: Ernest Lefner (LinkedIn)
Company: Gluware (Twitter)
Keywords: NetOps, network automation
Show: Let’s Talk 

Summary: Gluware is a network automation and orchestration company focused on intelligent network automation for the enterprise. We recently hosted Ernest Lefner, the newly appointed Chief Product Officer at Gluware, to discuss the current state of NetOps in the cloud era and the role that automation is playing in simplifying things. This show also includes a deep dive into how some of the high-level IT trends like the changing enterprise business models, cloud adoption and IT modernization are impacting the operation of networks.

“Companies are looking for unicorn engineers who can do it all. They need the freedom and the capability to build what the business needs, but still leverage that great experience of your network engineer and allow them to automate as well,” said Lefner. “Gluware can meet you anywhere in that journey you want to be. You can get into Gluware without having to be an expert, understanding what your expertise is, which is being a good engineer.”

Highlights of the show: 

• What drove Lefner to join Gluware as Chief Product Officer after 25+ years in financial services?
• What role is NetOps playing in today’s cloud-centric world?
• How is Gluware simplifying things for companies to help them drive business success through IT?
• How are IT trends such as cloud adoption changing the operation of networks?
• What is intent-based networking (IBN) and why should folks care about it?

About Ernest Lefner: Ernest Lefner brings a wealth of industry experience to his role as Chief Product Officer at Gluware. He co-founded ONUG in 2012 to help the user community take control of and accelerate network transformation while holding high-profile executive positions overseeing network transformation programs at Bank of America and EY.

About Gluware: Gluware is the leading intelligent network automation suite for the cloud era, trusted by Global 2000 enterprises across industries. Gluware automates the networks of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises, by simplifying how multi-domain enterprise networks are discovered, analyzed, and maintained. The company’s code-free, intent-based approach to network automation reduces the business risk of unplanned outages and downtime while elevating the performance of people and systems.

Here is the full unedited transcript of the show:

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi. This is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome TFiR Let’s Talk. And today we have with us Ernest Lefner, Chief Product Officer at Gluware. Ernest, it’s great to have you on the show.

Ernest Lefner: Thank you so much. I really look forward to it.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah. And there is so much to talk about today. We are going to of course talk about NetOps, but more importantly, we are going to talk about you, because you kind of moved out of the financial sector. As you were also saying, you’re out of the corporate world and now you’re in the startup world. So I want to understand that part of the journey. Also, it’s hard for me to find a point where I want to start but to be honest with you, let’s start with some of the basics, which is like, if I ask you because you joined the company in December, what is Gluware?

Ernest Lefner: Well, Gluware is a network automation and orchestration company focused on intelligent network automation. It’s really been around for quite some time. In their previous incarnation, they really focused on SD-WAN and automating SD-WAN ACI. They’ve really grown and matured into a fully blossomed automation and orchestration firm.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Perfect. And since you just joined the company, you do have a very refreshed version of the company. We covered it a little bit all the time. So I just wanted to hear your perspective. Now, I want to talk about you a bit. Really tell us what you have been doing in the financial sector and why you decided to not only just change roles, but change the whole industry, why?

Ernest Lefner: That’s a great one. So I’ve got 25 plus years in financial services across a variety of different companies and I’m most well known for working at Bank of America, for example, and doing the insourcing of the HP network. It was almost an $800 million insourcing of the network back. And I built the engineering architecture teams for network security and voice services. Also, I started an organization called ONUG, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Open Networking User Group, which is really all about sharing experiences and short cutting the adoption of technology through those shared experiences. Whether it’s software defined networking or cloud, or governance and analytics, we’re really trying to help move the industry forward. And coming to Gluware, it was a little bit different.

For being the network executive that’s tried to solve these problems on the ground for 25 years, you’re either someone looking at it new, you’re either someone who’s doing some scripting, doing it yourself, or you’re someone that’s using a tool. I’ve done all of those. And I really struggled. And what it came down to was, there needs to be a platform of capable automation there to start you day one. And that’s really what Gluware’s about. And that’s what drove me to be a part of that.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: All right. And once again, there are so many keywords, not really key words. So let’s start with some basic or major ones. Let’s just pick NetOps. You have seen the industry for so long and you also touched upon the owner group and all those things we of course covered and talked about. Things are changing. Now, we live in a cloud-centric world. People may not realize but networking is more or less like highway to big cities without highways, cities will die off. So if I ask you, what is the role that NetsOps is playing in the modern Cloud Native or cloud driven, whatever term you want to prefer is playing there?

Ernest Lefner: That’s a great question. I’ll probably answer it in a few different ways. The first is that the journey to the cloud is different. And what we’ve seen over the last few years is there was this initial rush to cloud. And then people came back and said, “Well, maybe I put too much out there. What’s the right thing to put out in the cloud?” And so they’ve kind of come back. You’ve seen a little bit of a withdrawal there. And what you’re finding is that the network and the network delivery is expanding at an exponential rate. People are like, “Well, I’m going to the cloud. That needs less network.” Well, it actually needs more network, more provisioning, more routers, more switches, and the complexity of that environment is going up significantly. So you’re seeing a much larger burden on the NetOps teams. You’ve got to raise the bar from a Security perspective that’s impacting NetOps teams and the provisioning of those services are getting much more complicated. So you’re finding a day in the life of a NetOps person becoming much more difficult than it was even just a few years ago.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: When we talk about Cloud Native or cloud era there was movement, we kind of looked at breaking down old silos. We also think of unicorn developers who can do everything, that were the whole idea. But the fact is that’s not the reality we have. That Security teams… And it has nothing to do with the role. It’s about some folks, they have interest and expertise in this particular area. And you do want expertise in certain area. And that I feel is kind of creating, you can call it federated or kind of soft silos are still there. But when more things are happening in the Cloud Native is that almost every company has to have a cloud or software strategy, which means that not everybody is Google, not everybody can have Google-like infrastructure. So there are a lot of companies, they have nothing to do with that which also means that we have to simplify things for you. So how is Gluware making it easier for such folks so they can leverage all of those things without being an expert in all those areas, because it can get very complicated very quickly?

Ernest Lefner: You’re absolutely right. I think I read an article that said in the next few years, AWS is going to be hiring 50,000 cloud engineers. If they really are hiring 50,000 cloud engineers, then we have really no hope of making all of our network engineers become coders because that shift of expertise isn’t going to happen. So we’ve got to figure out how to marry those problems together. How do we start to bear the unicorn you find, someone who can do it all. Give them the freedom and the capability to build for the custom that the business needs, but yet still leverage that great experience of your network engineer and allow them to automate as well. And sort of the greatest of Gluware is they can meet you anywhere in that journey you want to be. And there’s some new stuff coming out like RPA, Low Code, No Code.

You can get into Gluware without having to be an expert, understanding what your expertise is, which is being a good engineer. And you’re able to link all the different things that you want to do together, whether it’s config, OSM, whether it’s audit and compliance. And you’re able to execute that automation through the tool without having to be an expert. And that Low Code, No Code approach, whether it’s building a robotic process automation or whether it’s just doing an inventory in an audit, that stuff comes standard out of the box, which is impressive because you don’t have to be an Ansible expert. You don’t have to be a Python expert to get the benefit.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about the role that automation is playing in simplifying things?

Ernest Lefner: Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned just a minute ago, the number of routers and switches in the world is getting bigger exponentially as the cloud expands. So the number of devices that have to be automated isn’t getting smaller, it’s getting bigger. And so when you look for an automation platform, you don’t want to be stuck figuring out, oh, what’s my inventory? Or how many Cisco switches do I have? That’s the stuff that you need out of the box. You need that in the win column day one. And then the simplification is how do you group those together? How do you build the higher level business services, link them to the automation components that are below. And that allows you to do the things that you need to do to manage the network easy in a very quick and easy way. That CICD pipeline encapsulated.

So our operators on the ground are saying, “Oh, I just got a NIST alert that came in through Glu. I need to do an inventory to determine how many devices are affected. I need to script to work around and roll that out, or potentially roll out an automated OS upgrade.” And the goal really is to take those hard tasks that we’re struggling with, that really are the risk in the environment and simplify those out. And the great part about that is your unicorns and your engineers then get to focus on how the applications are consuming the network, instead of just trying to make the network work.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: How about you just look at it from a different perspective. We have been talking about what role NetOps and networking play. Now let’s just talk about if you look at these high level IT trends, although of course cloud adoption is happening. There are still a lot of companies, they still have, you can call it traditional or legacy set up and they are kind of modernizing themselves. How is that changing the operation of networks? What is the impact the network is facing because of these changes?

Ernest Lefner: No, it’s interesting. There are a couple big trends. COVID is one of them. We’ve got another big trend around zero trust coming down the pipeline where now the Security model’s changing. And I think the landscape, that line is being blurred between NetOps and Security personnel. And you’re finding that instead of being in that silo, like you mentioned before, you’re finding that there’s a joint effort that’s got to happen. And this is where NetDevOps is really starting to take hold, is that concept of how do we break that silo down? How do we bring people together and leverage all of those DevOps best practices and principles and bring them to bear for the network? In order to manage Security at scale, or to manage network at scale in the growing node environment, you’ve got to look for those efficiencies. As you see the NetOps, folks working very closely with Security, you’re seeing those natural synergies start to come to fruition.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Once again, as I was saying earlier, there are so many topics that popped up from your answer that I want to go through all of those, but we don’t have time and I would look to have sessions with you again in future as well. Well, let’s just know once again, pick one’s like, let’s talk about intent based networking. I want you to demystify, what do these terms mean and why should folks care about them?

Ernest Lefner: That’s a great question. And I think it’s an underserved question quite a bit. Everybody claims to be intent based. And what people mean when they say intent initially is that I’ve got a config said, a golden config, a template, and I could roll that template out for you at a push of a button, but it’s not really intent. Intent is things like, Hey, I’d like to roll 10% QoS out to my network, but I’ve got Juniper switches and Arista switches and Cisco switches. And what Gluware does, is it interprets that intent for you? It says, “Oh, you want 10% to go out to these devices?” It builds the config for you. It figures out how that configuration should be, what those commands are, and it rolls them all out for you. And that’s where you start getting into that intelligent network, with that eye towards self-operating because now you’ve got that closed loop development model that you’re going to be able to follow and build and run your network by. So it’s really exciting, and I appreciate you asking that question.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: We e are at the beginning of this year and we can start talking about how things will look like. So if I ask you based on the trends that you talked about in the beginning and also the needs that are changing, how do you see network operations evolve in the coming years? We cannot talk about five years from now, that’s what COVID taught us. Don’t talk too much in future.

Ernest Lefner: Yeah. No, I think that’s a good question. NetOps is going to grow and NetDevOps is really what you’re going to see emerge. As Security and networking closer together, as the complexities of managing environments workloads both in the cloud environment, as well as OnPrem data centers as they start to grow, the complexities aren’t going to get smaller. So you’re going to see the synergies through NetDevOps come together and you’re really going to see automation come to the forefront. I think you’ve really seen like a permission, like the NetDevOps communities starting to come together, the automation community. You’re really starting to see network automation be something that’s real for a change versus something that was talked about over the last 10 to 15 years. And you’re going to see that proliferation of automation to help drive that next generation of network operator. So I expect big things to happen in the merging of Security and NetOps. And I expect automation to become a big topic for the next few years.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of challenges do you see this adoption will create because there’s always an opportunity of challenges?

Ernest Lefner: Coming from the users side, the big challenge is going to be adoption. You’ve got a lot of people that are working in NetOps for a long time who said, “Hey, I didn’t need to learn how to code.” It turns out they were right. They didn’t. They said, “I don’t need automation to get the things done that I need to get done.” And I think the big challenge is going to be, how do you normalize that automation inside of the processes they use today and then connect that to the higher level business processes that all of the companies used to operate IT? Because it really comes down to understanding what you’re trying to do from a business perspective and tying that back down through the layers of IT. And that’s going to be a big focus. I go, that’s got big challenge.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: Now we of course talked about these challenges, before that we talked about the opportunities that are there. What does this mean for Gluware? So if I ask you, just hold a crystal ball in your hand and tell me, how are things going to look like for Gluware? What things do you have in the pipeline or in the roadmap?

Ernest Lefner: That’s a great question. I’ve been there about 60 days now and I can tell you that the roadmap is pretty sexy. In early 2022, you’re going to see RPA hit its robotic process automation, that’s really going to be the bow that ties the products together inside the platform. We’ve got NIST integration now. We’re taking CVEs directly in and we’re able to action those as a part of the platform. We’ve got topology coming later on this year, which is going to be about helping to visualize the network, really pointed towards making operating it a little bit easier. And then recently just got the funding from Bain, $43 million. If you take a look at some of the press releases, we hired ahead of VP of Security. We got a VP of AI and automation or AIOps, and that’s really starting to paint a picture of where we’re going to be heading. I think you can expect us to expand horizontally into new platforms and new capabilities and really start pushing the boundary of what self automation starts to look like. I’m very excited about the future of Gluware.

• Swapnil Bhartiya: I’m excited too because I get to cover all those progress that you folks are making. Ernest, thank you so much for taking time out today, and of course talk about your own journey and more importantly, we talked about the whole evolution at NetOps. I love that conversation. I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Ernest Lefner: Thank you so much. I’d be happy to come back anytime.