The Promise of Automation with Michael Bushong of Nokia – Tech Talks Interview

Welcome to Tech Field Day. I'm Mike Ong. I'm thrilled to be here.

I'm very thrilled to have you here, Mike. As you can tell, Mike and I go back a long ways in the, uh, networking industry, and we like to have a little bit of fun with it. But I tell you that one thing that doesn't seem like it's been a lot of fun recently is automation.

And I know we've been talking about this for, oh man, it feels like a decade or more. Why is automation not fun right now? So if my LinkedIn is any, any indication it's been two decades of it.

Um, oh, wow. I know, right? So I think it's one of those things that everyone does, but uh, just a little bit around the edges.

Um, for most people, automation's been, uh, difficult to achieve ambition. It's, uh, people have an idea of what they want to do. It's limited to like very isolated workflows.

Mm-hmm. And so what you end up getting is what I would call keystroke removal. Um, the idea of taking some complex workflow and scripting it out so you can do that thing faster.

Uh, that's not really automation. That's not where time accumulates, right? Where time accumulates in a system is in the handoffs between people, uh, between organizations and really between different tools and systems.

And so when all we do is go after discrete workflows, which you end up with is a lot of effort to do very, very little. Um, I think that has kind of led to the system freezing. And there's one other dynamic I wanna bring up.

Um, cloud, when you see Amazon or Google or Microsoft doing incredible things, the gap between what you think is possible and where you actually are today becomes ridiculously large. And when the gap becomes too large, I think people are afraid to leap. And at that point, everybody freezes in place, which has the kind of pernicious side effect of the, as the gap gets larger, the haves get even more the have nots stay where they are.

And the competitive disadvantage that people feel, that becomes even more real and more painful. Mike, would you say that one of the reasons why these automation projects that have these small provable goals are so popular is because it gives people kind of a, a goalpost to be able to measure against and to say that they've created a good solution, but when those problems get solved, people kind of give up because they don't have a way to shift the paradigm inside of their organization and kind of really affect real change? Yeah, I think it's, you wanna start with something tangible, and the first thing to do is like, what's the thing that I, I'd spend a lot of my time on?

How do I make that thing a little bit faster, a little bit better? And so I think you see people gravitate there. Um, on the vendor side, frankly, it's, you know, how do I get a high return on investment?

Which means what are the workflows that are ubiquitous? They're literally everywhere. And so we arrive at a couple of things.

Uh, zero touch provisioning and VLAN provisioning. Like that is the pinnacle of automation in most environments. Um, if you want to, to do something more meaningful, you've gotta identify real workflows.

Um, you've gotta identify, uh, meaningful activities inside an organization, and then you've gotta put together more than just light scripting. It's like, how do you get all the information required for those workflows together in one place so that you can do if this, then that Only when you accomplish some of those things can you, uh, really have like a breakthrough impact. And then finally, like, doing that is not that straightforward because if you were to ask almost any enterprise today, tell me about your workflows.

You're gonna get five minutes of silence. Now, one of the things that you've been working on here at Nokia is this idea of event driven automation. We, we got a great view of it at networking field exclusive with Nokia.

Obviously, if you've been thinking about these things and been getting feedback from people on LinkedIn, those are elements of what EDA is going to be able to deliver, right? Yeah. I think what we're doing with EDA is, is actually pretty good, right?

We start with tools that are familiar in common in sort of the most advanced environments, but we package those up so that you don't have the adoption hurdles that you might see in places that really just need fabric management. If you can focus on consumability automation on your terms, it doesn't require a re-architecture. It doesn't require hiring, you know, net new people.

It doesn't require retooling your entire operations environment. Doing something on your terms is liberating. And so what we've done here is we've, we've really nailed the packaging, the consumability part.

The second piece really the impediment to operations and automation is a little bit different than what people think. Um, today, all of the programmatic interfaces that you need to go do something quickly, they exist. Why don't people use them?

Because when you go fast in networking, it's fatal. Mm-hmm. Right?

And so what we've taught ourselves, a couple generations of networkers, we've taught ourselves that speed is, is lethal. When speed is lethal, it ceases to be functional. Mm-hmm.

But we're focusing on with Ida is how do I take the, the lethality out of automation? How do I make it easier to do? How do I make the outcomes guaranteed?

Not because I'm simply saying they're guaranteed, but how do you use like math to make sure that good is good? Um, bill Gates had a great quote, I'm not gonna quote him 'cause it was like 7,000 words, but the, the crux of it was, um, you can't automate things, uh, that are not good, right? Automation is neutral, it's an amplifier.

So if you've got good, it gives you lots of good, but if you've got bad automation's, the fastest way to break things at scale, what ida's doing is it's taking away bad. Now, if we take away bad, we make it consumable and we leverage modern tools and techniques, then you start unlocking what you can really do in the automation space. Sounds like what you've done is you've built a platform that's easy to get into, but has the extensibility necessary to ensure that people don't stall out along this journey and kind of get frustrated and give up.

Uh, that's exactly right. And so, you know, as I always tell you and your audience, you know, we're always hiring. So if you want a job in marketing, because I think you just nailed it better than I did.

Well, the other thing that you can see is all the great videos that were recorded at Networking Field Day exclusive with Nokia and Mike, if people want to go to learn a little bit more about all of these awesome things that you're building, where can they go to do that? com, we've got a, a whole set of applications, or not applications. We have a set of, uh, resources around EA and you can see demos, you can see a lot of the material that's there.

And then frankly, you know, e a's a show me kind of, uh, product. And so if you wanna get just hands on, you know, we've got, uh, accessibility through things like Container Labs as well. Awesome.

com for more information. Mike, thanks for the interview. Good luck with everything.

Thank you. Let's go to Wendy's.