We’ve been talking about the autonomous enterprise for many years now. Especially in the wake of all the AI hype, the idea that an enterprise can be put on autopilot and run itself is still bandied about. But what is happening to enable that?
I recently sat down with Shailesh Manjrekar, CMO at CloudFabrix, about his company’s partnership with Cisco. Manjrekar described CloudFabrix as “the company that can enable your autonomous enterprise journey.” The partnership with Cisco focuses on a few core elements of that journey: automated data integration, enrichment, contextualization, and composability with its “Observability pipelines.”
CloudFabrix is certainly an interesting company. The management team has had several successful startups in the past, with three acquisitions by Cisco, including Jahi Networks (acquired in 2004), Pari Networks (acquired in 2011), and Cloupia (acquired in 2012).
CloudFabrix’s Data Fabric works with Cisco's Observability Platform, automates data ingestion pipelines, and provides insights into inventory and analytics with its Observability Pipelines. Manjrekar gave me some background on the partnership. He says they complement Cisco’s Observability Platform.
“There are three elements to this data fabric he told me. “First, it allows us to connect with any data source. Second, we bring in all that data, then normalize it and enrich it with new real-time topology information automatically—all of this happens in the pipeline. Then, you can run correlation and clustering and all the insights. So, we process that data, convert it into OTEL, and then ingest it into the Cisco platform.”
The CloudFabrix approach
There are a number of critical key elements of the CloudFabrix approach. The company has several modules that work with Cisco’s observability platform, including:
These modules allow CloudFabrix to “plug in” to the various applications and services to simplify deployment. These have been released in the past six months, with five in December and January. The speed at which these have been rolled out shows the openness and flexibility of the Cisco platform.
“Our time to market is accelerating, and that's because of all the automation we’ve been able to develop,” Manjrekar told me. “And it's not just us benefiting. We’ve become the trusted advisor for other partners who want to leverage our automation.”
Up close on a few of the modules
CloudFabrix sees itself as one of the building blocks for Cisco’s Observability Platform—not just another platform module developer. Looking at a few of the modules, it’s easy to see why.
A few final thoughts
Cisco’s technology has long been the de facto standard in networking and is the connective tissue for the business world. CloudFabrix enables customers to get more out of the Cisco dollars already spent by enabling greater automation.
The experience of the CloudFabrix leadership team working with Cisco—including CEO Raju Datla, CPO Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, and CTO Raju Penmetsa—should offer partners and customers a level of confidence that the company has the know-how to take its plan from the drawing board to reality.
Over the past two years, I have seen a dramatic about-face regarding IT pros and their attitudes towards automation. Pre-pandemic, the notion of IT that runs itself was viewed skeptically as threatening people’s jobs. Today, IT pros are overwhelmed with complexity. Recently, I ran a survey asking 500 IT pros what they need from the infrastructure providers to support digital initiatives, and the top response was automation, supporting the vision of the “autonomous enterprise.” For those not yet on board, your company is only as agile as the infrastructure enables. Manual and CLI-driven operations will hold the company back.
Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.
Read his other Network Computing articles here.
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