Cisco Systems Inc. offers a prestigious exam for international expert-level networking certification called the CCIE. Not everyone passes. Those who fail the exam don’t usually start their own companies as a result. But not everyone is Lingping Gao (pictured), chief executive officer and chairman of  network automation company NetBrain Technologies Inc. Gao failed the CCIE and then set out to do something about it.

“It was a big blow to my ego,” Gao said. “So I said I would create a company so that I could pass. This is the genesis of NetBrain, to help people do better on their network management work.”

Gao spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed NetBrain’s approach to network automation and why some organizations fear the use of automated tools (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Building a comprehensive model

NetBrain is a just-in-time network automation platform that builds a comprehensive operating model through analysis of 12,000 variables per node. A network with 1,000 nodes will therefore have 12 million variables, all continuously monitored by NetBrain’s artificial-intelligence and machine-learning tools, according to Gao.

Key to the company’s approach is to tap the knowledge and skills of DevOps and NetOps, along with the intelligence of various collaborative partners, such as Cisco Systems Inc., to create a network automation process that anyone can use.

“There’s the data part of it, there’s the knowledge part of it, and these two have to meet to create network automation,” Gao said. “Anyone who has knowledge of the network can create automation. We have over 2,000 enterprise customers, and they are automating not just once or twice a week, but 1,000 times a day.”

By creating a rich ecosystem of automation, NetBrain is seeking to address the “fear” in some enterprise information technology organizations that automation tools are perishable commodities, good for short periods of time before the IT landscape changes and they become less useful.

“Why was automation only used once in the past?” Gao asked. “Because it’s a closed loop; it’s a script. It wasn’t designed with a comprehensive model behind it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: NetBrain Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetBrain nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE