By Jay Thontakudi, Senior Product Marketing Manager and Tim Van Herck, Director of Technical Product Management, VMware SASE
The edge is a complicated place. Locations such as hospitals, retail stores, and manufacturing plants are confronted with stacks of proprietary hardware and software, producing data that needs to be processed in real time and secured with strong solutions. Generative AI has already proven that it can simplify complexity, and VMware Edge Intelligence (formerly VMware Edge Network Intelligence) has proven that it can provide tools for advanced IT remediation. Today at VMware Explore Barcelona, we’re pleased to unveil VMware Intelligent Assist for the software defined edge, which enhances the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator with generative AI together with intelligent remediation and security for both OT and IT environments.
Watch the video demo to discover the insights that generative AI can bring to the VMware SASE product portfolio.
Bringing intelligence to the edge through software
The software-defined edge is a distributed digital infrastructure that runs workloads across dispersed locations, close to endpoints that are producing and consuming data. It extends to where the users and devices are—whether they are in the office, on the road, in a retail store, or on the factory floor.
However, edge deployments today are proprietary, complex integrations of custom hardware and software. This gives rise to integration challenges, difficulty in management, and limits the ability to adapt to new business requirements.
To solve these problems, deployments are shifting away from custom hardware and software to the new software-defined edge that is intelligent, programmable, and scalable. Enterprises need solutions to connect widely dispersed locations more securely and reliably to the larger enterprise network in a scalable manner. As the number of users, devices, locations, and applications multiplies, enterprises need new tools for managing this complexity. And they need intelligent tools that automate the operations, monitor the performance, and ensure the security of the wide range of edge endpoints, locations, and services.
Introducing Intelligent Assist for the software-defined edge
VMware is solving the network connectivity, security, and user experience management challenges at the edge with VMware SASE and the integrated AIOps capabilities of VMware Edge Intelligence. VMware Edge Intelligence will extend these AI and ML capabilities to enable a comprehensive telemetry service for VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator, featuring visibility, insight, and self-healing for services delivered by software-defined edge.
Intelligent Assist will take advantage of these signals from VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator to further simplify the operational experience of connecting, securing, and managing workloads, users and IoT devices at the edge. Based on generative AI, the solution will accelerate automation, shrink the skillset gap, and speed up time to resolution.
“The financial services industry is highly demanding and when problems happen, we need them fixed quickly. I am a huge fan of using AI to solve complex problems. VMware’s Intelligent Assist feature could have a significant impact for us in terms of problem solving and RTO. Being able to use a chat bot to get insight to questions and solve problems quickly is huge and breaks down a barrier to quick support! We are thrilled with our VMware SD-WAN solution, but the AI feature turns the dial up to eleven!”
Intelligent Assist will highlight patterns, anomalies and deviations detected in data and allow users to interact to gather more insight. It will help users gain recommendations to proactively address deviations in performance or behavior, increase efficiency of operations, and engage in self-learning to close the skillset gaps and manage the budget. Using the inferencing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), Intelligent Assist will provide faster access to relevant information.
Intelligent Assist will simplify network admins’ interactions with VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator to manage the software-defined edge.
Intelligent Assist will provide the following benefits:
Speed up resolution: The solution will bring speed and precision to manage services at the edge. It will enable help desk personnel to narrow down the problem domain and route tickets to the right escalation teams for resolution. This can help eliminate significant time spent identifying the right team on the escalation path to resolve issues. The solution will reduce the time spent waiting for tickets to be assigned to the right owner.
Reduce risks in managing services at the edge: Intelligent Assist will leverage curated data from AI and ML-driven trend analysis performed by VMware Edge Intelligence to direct network operations down the right path to remediation. This will help increase confidence in making future changes to the infrastructure and speeds up CAB (change approval board) approvals.
Bridge skillset gaps in IT operations: Intelligent Assist will enable L0/L1 support to address increasingly complex problems that would typically require a domain expert to solve. This will help reduce the duration a ticket stays open and enable operations teams to efficiently manage their staff budget.
Reduce complexity at the edge: Query-led discovery and problem hunting will help operations make sense of distributed digital infrastructure without requiring a physical presence or virtual visit to each edge location. Intelligent Assist will reduce the need to interpret graphs or correlate data across multiple tools to discover, root cause and resolve issues.
Intelligent Assist for the software-defined edge will improve the operational experience for IT, OT, security, and compliance teams while reducing the risk and complexity of managing services. It is expected to be available for tech preview in the first quarter of calendar 2024. If you are interested in this solution, contact us through your local VMware sales team.
