“So what if I could get a secure message from my network infrastructure delivered to me on Twitter, Facebook or Chatter and my local native language – because if I'm in Germany I'm tweeting in German and Facebooking in German,” said Vala Afshar, Enterasys’s Chief Customer Officer, “and what if all that information was delivered to me automatically based on a set of parameters that the machines recognizes without any human input?”
For me, that sounds like a good candidate for a Turing test.
With network killer viruses like Stuxnet and Flame on the loose, and countless new, unsupported mobile devices added daily to an organization’s network, it makes sense that supplementing humans with social and mobile enabled machines will benefit enterprise networks. But can machines truly understand, translate and take action when confronted with network issues?
Self Supporting Networks
The Universidad Complutense de Madrid which has 110,000 undergrad, 20,000 grad students, used to call Enterasys about wireless network problems occurring when students simply walked from the library to the dorm. “How does one begin to solve that issue? Is it the access point, the switch, the router, the applications running the network? They're all solution oriented, very complex problems, which one agent is expected to solve without much support from the hardware,” Afshar told me while explaining why they developed ISSAC. Back then, his machines weren’t talking.
But today, when Enterasys proactively detects that a user had sustained low signal strength for a period of time, it issues a command using SalesForce.com’s Chatter to find exactly who they are, where they are, and what they did up to that point. It then takes that digital forensic information into Salesforce.com, parses it and generates a tech support case. “Our support cases have built-in automated workflow and notification services. Once a case is created, it then chats back to the user who’s experiencing poor wireless connectivity letting them know that we know you have poor connectivity. We also issue a help desk ticket, and we’ll notify them once the situation is resolved,” Afshar explained.
But here’s the kicker, the entire lifecycle is machine to machine. There are no humans involved.
Chances are, the user doesn’t even realize it.
They’re Doing this With Salesforce.com?
I’ve built and seen a lot of Salesforce.com implementations but nothing like this.
Not only does Enterasys give its customers and employees the ability to ‘friend’ machines to receive alerts and updates, they can also send simple, secured human language commands to machines via social networks to have it take action. But Afshar has taken it many steps further. Within Salesforce.com Enterasys has created private machine social networks where machines are collaborating with other machines. Humans are only there to observe and receive updates.
Better, the Salesforce.com solution allows Afshar the ability to securely extend a private cloud to customers. Once connected, Enterasys can monitor the health of their network while Salesforce.com proactively alerts the customer to any issues on their social network of choice. Since it’s a shared workspace, machines and humans work together to keep the network healthy.
If that wasn’t enough, Enterasys is using some of these same machine related concepts internally to help their salespeople and executives build better predictive models that increase sales. “Our sales forecasts will chat. If a sales deal is downgraded from a commit stage to a lower probability stage; or if a deal hasn’t closed within 10 days in a quarter, Salesforce.com will automatically notify our executives so that they can get engaged to help close these deals,” Afshar tells me.
Does it Make Any Difference?
Today CIOs are still spending 70-80% of the time keeping the lights on. As more and more devices and people are added to an organization’s network, something more is needed to help manage that complexity. Adding more employees can be expensive, so a solution like ISAAC frees the CIO up to be a strategic contributor to the enterprise.
For network support, having more friendly eyes (even if they are machines) on the network are a good thing. So good that Enterasys’s NetPromoter score with customers sits at an outstanding 81, and their first call resolution is 94%. They attribute that, in large part, to the support the ISAAC system is giving them and to the Salesforce.com platform.
In the near future, we’ll see what some call ‘Social Knowledge Networks’ or communities of people, social networking tools, and artificial intelligence that provide timely access to contextual knowledge. These networks will be designed for a particular purpose or to help people learn about a subject important to the organization. Enterasys has created one of the first, and there will be many more.
Best of all, they will be created for people by people - and yes machines.
