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In line with current trends in the technology industry, most of the discussion topics at Cisco Live 2024 in Las Vegas were centered on AI, as technology leaders and practitioners came together to discuss the integration of AI into traditional infrastructure.
Hosted by Sanjay Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer, Cisco ThousandEyes, the panel discussion focused on how AI can be used to ensure customers’ digital experiences.
Mehta said the steps being taken to ensure a good digital experience include:
- Provides visibility into your network infrastructure.
- Use AI and machine learning to gain insights from your data.
- Follow closed loop recommendations.
Organizations that prioritize network experience operate their networks with improved performance to support application experience and UX, thus ensuring a holistic digital experience.
The session featured two companies looking to improve their overall digital experience: CSL Behring, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and Room & Board, a Minneapolis-based retailer with nearly 20 stores across the U.S. Both companies said they achieved this goal by integrating ThousandEyes into their network infrastructure.
Cisco recently updated its ThousandEyes platform with AI-powered tools to improve visibility and enable automation across the network—two capabilities that were essential to David Mann, head of network services and enterprise monitoring at CSL Behring, and Mark Rodrigue, senior network engineer at Room & Board.
Rodrigue said the need to innovate was born out of the company’s growing use of the internet. Because Room & Board uses the internet as both a transport network and an application host, the network needed a tool that could provide insight into its internal operations and public internet resources, he said. Like Rodrigue, Mann said his interest in Thousand Eyes was driven by: A platform that helps teams understand current and future insights About their network.
The Challenges of Pre-Optimization
CSL Behring and Room & Board deployed ThousandEyes to improve their network experience, an initiative that Mann and Rodrigue say was necessary to reduce the impact of network downtime on their business. They share a similar view of the devastation that network outages cause.
Mann said that if the network is not properly optimized, it could have an immediate negative impact on CSL Behring’s business. The company’s network is made up of countless devices across its infrastructure, and if the network isn’t performing at an optimal level, some customers may stop visiting CSL Behring locations. Additionally, Mann said that if CSL Behring’s network goes down, the UX across the organization will suffer.
“You need to know when your application is working and when it’s not working,” he said. “If your application is not working efficiently, it takes longer to process. It takes longer to process, it takes longer to produce, it reduces the experience level.”
Rodrigue agrees: When Room & Board’s network experiences downtime, administrators are forced to spend time troubleshooting issues when they could be working on more important tasks. Rodrigue says this use case highlights the need for network visibility. If network professionals understand how the network works, they can spend more time ensuring customer UX.
“If we can monitor, understand, correlate and track these experiences, there will be no uncertainty. [about the network]”Our employees can focus on building relationships with customers, designing spaces and creating an enjoyable experience for our customers,” Rodrigue said.
Increased visibility leads to a better network experience
Mann said network visibility produces data-driven insights that his team can leverage to support network management and operations. When CSL Behring recently completed an acquisition, stakeholders wanted to deploy software across the new locations.
Mann’s team needed to provide acquiring partners with information about how newly deployed applications would perform, so they added application profiles to test agents at each location. The profiles included reports and dashboards about the applications’ expected performance and usability in the new environment. This strategy allowed partners to make data-driven decisions, Mann says.
Room & Board experienced a similar use case for ThousandEyes integration when deploying software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). Rodrigue says that when the team considered additional connectivity links for their SD-WAN architecture, including MPLS, 4G LTE, and 5G, they were unsure of how the connectivity options would work as a transport network.
Prior to the SD-WAN implementation, Rodrigue’s team deployed software agents that connected to the network infrastructure to collect data and monitor performance. This process allowed the team to understand different aspects of the network, such as latency requirements and potential outages. Path visualization also allowed them to validate changes made to the SD-WAN.
Benefit from a better network experience
Since integrating ThousandEyes, CSL Behring and Room & Board have improved their networks to provide their users with a better network experience. In both cases, the improvements start with the professionals who operate the networks.
For example, Room & Board has moved from manual to automated testing as part of its troubleshooting process. Previously, to troubleshoot issues with the checkout process, admins would manually add items to the cart to identify the problem. Now, Rodrigue’s team has automated this process, monitoring checkouts and alerting the network team if there are any issues.
CSL Behring’s network improvements gave the company the tools to provide better customer support to its network team. The organization built dashboards that resembled how the business runs. When CSL Behring’s network team viewed the dashboards, they saw metrics related to business goals instead of raw data, so staff were better equipped to support and communicate with customers.
Now that customers can receive support from general IT staff, issues don’t get escalated to more highly skilled staff, and network professionals can focus on more important tasks. Prior to this implementation, Mann’s team was experiencing double-digit major incidents each month; now, incident numbers have dropped to single digits.
“If you have a unified platform that everyone uses, everyone can get the data that’s important to them from there,” Mann says. “You can address the real issues instead of creating workarounds in your network to hide other issues that may exist in your environment.”
Deanna Darrah is the Associate Site Editor for TechTarget’s networking site. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2021, she began editing and writing at TechTarget.
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