Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, CEO and co-founder, Mushroom Networks
AI Gets Into Everything
I will not be the first when I predict AI’s (Artificial Intelligence) increasing reach into various applications and into our day-to-day lives. However, being familiar with the WAN (Wide Area Networking) industry and the cutting technologies that shape networking in IT enterprise, I can safely predict the emergence and acceleration of various “clever” (pun intended) uses of AI in our industry.
At a high level, AI is the ability of a machine to look at piles of data to observe patterns (usually patterns that are not easy to pre-program ahead of time) and accordingly make decisions based on those patterns. Naturally, humans are great in pattern recognition in the areas that matter to our survival and we are not so good with large date sets, especially when compared to a well-trained AI system.
The key term there is the “well-trained” which really means feeding enough number of and high quality data points to train the AI model. Given enough size and quality of data, AI’s capabilities are quite impressive, well beyond a human’s abilities on that very narrow task of identifying patterns. Of course when we talk about networking, we are all immersed with data. There is nothing but a constant stream of data that is being generated in networks. Of course today, most of that data is either not collected or not processed.
In 2019, we will see the utilization of AI based algorithms to further process and make sense of network data. Given the common cloud based architectures that are naturally part of many networks, collecting and crunching large number of data sets are not challenging. On top of that, the available AI tools in the cloud provide a natural extension of such data collection and processing.
We, here at Mushroom Networks, are certainly aiming at networks that are becoming more cognitive in 2019. That is to say, networks will have the ability to collect and process network data, with the specific goal of identifying patterns to automate network operations. We believe the vision of networks being on autopilot will start to become a reality in 2019 and beyond.
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About the Author
Dr. Cahit Jay Akin is the CEO and co-founder of Mushroom Networks, https://www.mushroomnetworks.com , a long-time supplier of SD-WAN infrastructure for enterprises and service providers. Prior to Mushroom Networks, Dr. Akin spent many years as a successful venture capitalist. Dr. Akin received his Ph.D. and M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. Dr. Akin has worked on technical and research aspects of communications for over 15 years including authoring several patents and many publications. Dr. Akin was a nominee for the Most Admired CEO award by San Diego Business Journal.
