June 2021 - Augtera

Augtera Emerges From Stealth With $13M Series A Led by Intel Capital

Posted on Jun 29th, 2021 by Mark Seery

Augtera Emerges From Stealth With $13M Series A Led by Intel Capital; Launches Network AI Platform for Proactive Management and Resolution in Multi-Cloud Networks

Fortune 500 and Global Customers Gain 90% Faster Issue Detection and Prevent 40% Network Incidents

June 29, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Augtera Networks, the industry-first Network AI platform purpose built for modern enterprise multi-cloud networks, launched today with $13M in a Series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, and return investors Bain Capital Ventures and Acrew Capital. Already deployed in large scale production networks of Fortune 500 and global companies including Orange and Colt Technologies and collaborating with Dell Technologies, Augtera is reimagining network performance and management using its optimized AI algorithms to provide proactive visibility, prevent network incidents, and dramatically reduce resolution times. This financing brings total capital raised to $18M and Nick Washburn, Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at Intel Capital, joins Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, on Augtera’s board.

“By dramatically increasing application performance while drastically cutting network opex, network team productivity goes up, unlocking a new wave of innovation and agility freeing up teams to perform at their highest level.”

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“Augtera’s Network AI Platform is effectively the proverbial ‘easy button’ for managing networks in a proactive and automated way,” said Nick Washburn of Intel Capital. “Co-founders Rahul and Bhupesh have leveraged their deep domain experience to build a product that is automatically identifying and correlating grey failure and other challenging networking problems that have plagued large enterprises and service providers. Augtera’s customer ROI feedback validated our thesis that the market was in need of a wholesale new approach – which Augtera delivers.”

The importance of network efficiencies and performance to applications and consumers is at its highest level in the history of modern enterprises. At the same time unpredictable performance and fragmentation have increased with the adoption of hybrid cloud and software defined networking. As enterprise networks have grown increasingly large and heterogeneous, management has become exponentially difficult, highly manual, and largely reactionary once problems occur, leaving operators scrambling to fix issues, while contending with overwhelming noise, after customers complain and applications suffer. Due to the impact of hybrid networking, 50% of network operations teams will be required to re-architect their networking monitoring stack by 2024, according to Gartner’s Market Guide for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD).

Addressing these issues requires network intelligence that hasn’t existed before. Augtera applies AI-driven anomaly detection techniques purpose-built for the network to automatically identify problems before they reach the boiling point, enabling operators to avoid network incidents by proactively detecting problems, grey failures and unknown unknowns. Augtera’s AI-driven resolution provides so much context and cross-layer correlation that operators are notified of the root cause and can resolve issues that escape detection much faster. Augtera does this across the application and network layers allowing modern enterprises to break silos, reveal if the network is the cause of application issues, and get insights needed to tune the network for application performance.

“Dynamic pattern recognition is how a new intelligence takes shape. By ingesting and analyzing every bit of data from every source, we uncover patterns at scale. This leads to entirely new data and insights and creates a new network intelligence that is the foundation of our platform,” said Rahul Aggarwal, founder and CEO at Augtera. “By dramatically increasing application performance while drastically cutting network opex, network team productivity goes up, unlocking a new wave of innovation and agility freeing up teams to perform at their highest level.”

Early Enterprise Customers Report Significant Impact

Augtera’s network intelligence platform is already helping customers gain 90% faster issue detection of critical issues, reduce resolution times by 50-60%, and prevent 40-50% of service impacting network incidents.

“Our customers are increasingly asking for deeper and proactive visibility across applications and the network. To address this, we continue to innovate across our infrastructure portfolio to add new and more real-time telemetry data,” said Ihab Tarazi, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Networking and Solutions, Dell Technologies. “Our collaboration with Augtera and its AI platform offers customers cross-layer, actionable insights they need for this increased visibility.”

“AI and advanced data management platforms are used at Orange in every area of our business. As part of that umbrella Orange International Network Infrastructure and Services (OINIS) has deployed Augtera Networks in the backbone to determine how AI/ML could help detecting grey failures before service interruption,” said Jean-Louis Le Roux, vice president of Global Wholesale Enterprise Network within Orange. “After more than a year of deployment in the production infrastructure, the platform has shown instrumental results and demonstrated several use cases. There is increasing relevance as we apply it closer to services, where the noise from network signals and alarms is massive. We will progress now with SDWAN services monitoring use cases.”

Machine Learning Platform Purpose Built to Solve Real Network Problems at Scale

“The networking industry has been slow to adopt Big Data and Machine Learning techniques. Bhupesh and I recognized when we started that network operations tools were stuck in the manual and static mindset of the past. To move the industry to the modern era we had to completely rethink this and build an intelligent system that learns automatically from the diverse network specific data distributions, understands network topology across data center, cloud, WAN, SD-WAN, and the applications that run on that topology, and provides high fidelity actionable results. This had to be done economically at scale and it was important to architect this as a platform that can integrate with the IT ecosystem and modern DevOps tools,” continues Augtera’s Aggarwal.

Augtera’s AI platform is available immediately to additional enterprises and can be deployed quickly through either a SaaS or on-prem implementation.

About Augtera Networks

Augtera Networks’ industry-first network AI platform is designed for proactive visibility and resolution in multi-cloud networks. Founded by Rahul Aggarwal and Bhupesh Kothari, Augtera’s investors include Intel Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital and Acrew Capital. Augtera’s Network AI Platform is deployed in large scale production networks of Fortune 500 and global enterprises enabling them to proactively prevent network incidents and dramatically reduce resolution times. To learn more visit http://www.augtera.com.

Augtera Networks raises $13M to apply AI to networking

Posted on by Mark Seery

VentureBeat report on Augtera Networks Series A funding round of $13M led by Intel Capital for ‘leveraging AI to allow networks to keep up with increasing scale’. Read report at: https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/29/augtera-networks-raises-13m-to-apply-ai-to-networking/

The First Network AI for the Modern Enterprise

Posted on Jun 28th, 2021 by Rahul Aggarwal, Founder & CEO

When we started Augtera we had a mission to leverage Machine Learning and deep analytics to transform the networking industry. Today we are launching our company and our industry-first Network AI platform – a major milestone towards that goal.

We are launching with several Fortune 500 and global customers, including Orange and leading e-commerce and financial enterprises, who have deployed Augtera in production at scale with significant quantifiable benefits. And with $18M of capital raised to date from top tier venture capital firms Bain Capital Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and Acrew Capital.

We have also teamed up with Dell and Netone to integrate our platform with the solutions that they are bringing to the market around hybrid-cloud, disaggregation in the data center and software defined networking.

By bringing to market our platform, Augtera is reimagining network performance and management using our optimized AI algorithms to provide proactive visibility, prevent network incidents, and dramatically reduce resolution times in multi-cloud, data center, WAN and SD-WAN networks.

First Network AI Intuition

We started with an intuition that the networking industry had fallen behind in the adoption of Big Data and AI technologies and that an AI platform purpose-built for networks could transform network operations, orchestration and design.

As we started discussions with network engineers and operators our intuition was not only validated but we also realized that the use cases for such a platform were unlimited. It also became very clear early on that such a platform had to be “purpose built” for networks because it had to understand network semantics including rich and complex network topologies and diverse data types and distributions. Our team had deep expertise in networking, having pioneered and built industry changing MPLS and VPN technologies and products, and in addition we had spent several years working with analytics and Machine Learning. We had the right team, were prepared to undertake fundamental R&D and had the patience needed to gather large scale production data and then build our algorithms.

New Network Intelligence

We decided to focus our energy initially on network operations as entropy and fragmentation were increasing with the adoption of hybrid cloud and software defined networking. Fast forward to the present and this trend has only accelerated and network operators are facing increasing urgency to solve burning issues: lack of proactive visibility, overwhelming noise, silos between networks and applications.

Addressing these issues requires network intelligence that hasn’t existed before.

Pattern recognition is how a new intelligence takes shape. At Augtera by ingesting and analyzing every bit of data from every source we uncover patterns at scale. This leads to entirely new data and insights and hence creates a new network intelligence that is the foundation of our platform.

Augtera Networks Continuous Network AI platform — First Continuous Network AI platform

Problem and Solution

Network operations is very reactive today. Operators scramble to fix issues when customers complain and applications suffer. Augtera on the other hand applies anomaly detection algorithms purpose built for the network to automatically find what’s normal, to find problems when they are brewing, before they reach the boiling point and before things break. This allows operators to detect problems, grey failures and unknown unknowns proactively, thereby avoiding network incidents.

There is so much alert noise, lack of context and fragmentation today that when things break it takes significant time and manual effort to separate the signal from the noise, find the root cause and resolve issues. With Augtera the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher and operators can detect issues that escape prevention much faster. Augtera’s AI algorithms provide so much context and cross-layer correlation that operators can then find the root cause and the resolution for these issues far quicker. This is what we call AI Driven Resolution. We believe that as operators get comfortable with this, some of the resolution work flows can be automated, thereby reducing the mitigation times even further.

Augtera does this across the application and network layers allowing modern enterprises to break silos, reveal if the network is the cause of application issues and to get insights needed to tune the network for application performance.

Benefits

Our network intelligence platform is already preventing 40-50% of service impacting network incidents for customers with 90% faster detection of critical issues and 50-60% reduction in resolution times. We believe that these numbers have significant room to improve with constant online learning and as the platform matures.

First Network AI Platform

Our microservices-based platform can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud or in a hybrid mode. We are designed to handle all network architectures and are already deployed in production in hyper-scale data centers and private clouds; WAN, SD-WAN and hybrid-cloud. We are optimized for massive scale and the world of telemetry streaming. At the same time, we have spent significant effort scaling SNMP and syslog data ingestion and Machine Learning pipelines, and our AI algorithms are providing customers with high value across these technologies that are still widely deployed across networks.

Augtera Networks Business Logic / Policy

When we started Augtera we realized that network operations tools were stuck in the manual and static mindset of the past. To move the industry to the modern era we had to completely rethink this and build an intelligent system that learns automatically from the diverse network specific data distributions, understands network topology, the applications that run on that topology and provides high fidelity actionable results. This had to be done economically at scale and it was important to architect this as a platform that can integrate with the IT ecosystem and modern DevOps tools.

Our progress is the result of our team’s focus on solving high value difficult problems empowered by our investors and the trust placed in us by our customers. Thank you all. We look forward to the next chapter in our journey together.