Guest: Ernest Lefner (LinkedIn)
Company: Gluware (Twitter)

Managing today’s networks is becoming increasingly complex. Heavily regulated industries such as banking and healthcare are struggling to keep up with compliance. In this episode of TFiR Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Ernest Lefner, Chief Product Officer at Gluware, to discuss what’s new with the latest iteration of their product, Gluware 5, and how these features will take network automation to a new level.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Gluware 5 has four major components: topology, API modeling, service connectors, and network RPA.
• API modeling is the expansion of Gluware from the command line interface (CLI) into the integrated API space with Meraki.
• Gluware Topology was a product of customer feedback. It was developed to address some of the challenges their audit and compliance customers were facing with having to buy other tools or build diagrams by hand.
• Lefner shares two significant topics at one of the first in-person Open Networking User Group (ONUG) events in the Fall following COVID: the importance of network automation in the healthcare space and the role of policy as code.
• Many big companies were not ready for the extent of changes after COVID, with many enterprise customers going from 10-15% of their workforce working from home to becoming fully disaggregated. Lefner feels that many just expanded their infrastructure to accommodate these changes, but many are now revisiting these strategies to look for smarter ways to provide access to people and services.
• Networks are evolving, with cloud edge becoming increasingly important and the way the network is being consumed is changing. Lefner believes Gluware is in a good position since it can help customers navigate these changes in networks by automating their cloud-based policies and on-prem network-based infrastructure.
• Gluware is primarily focused on the Global 2000 enterprise customer base, but is keeping its eye on private 5G networks. Lefner says that if they do see that their customers are starting to adopt 5G, then they will look at helping to automate that infrastructure, too.
• Gluware has customers who are dependent on response time and application performance. They are seeing aggressive cloud edge adoption from customers that require a high level of performance, but not as much for those where response time is critical.
• Some of Gluware’s biggest use cases are around inventory management, config drift, audit and compliance, and lifecycle management.
• Although Amazon hires thousands of developers each year, this does not always trickle down to network teams. Lefner discusses how Gluware is helping with its drag-and-drop approach to building automation by helping free up time so customers can focus on business-level problems.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.