Introduction to Nokia with Andy Lapteff

My name is Andy Lapt. I am a network engineer, turned product marketing manager. I think that's my title, uh, for Nokia Data Center.

I'm primarily responsible for, uh, Nokia event driven automation, also known as ida. Alrighty, let's see if this thing works. Ha.

So, um, I've been here before as a delegate, and, um, that is where I learned, I'll be honest with you, I didn't know Nokia was in the data center space. I, like Tom mentioned, I knew about the cell phones and destructible cell phones. Um, there's a cute little trope that my buddy Collin says that, you know, there are, we've built networks as indestructible as the cell phones, right?

And it's, and it's true. So, um, what I learned at the tech field day that, uh, Tom mentioned was that Nokia has been for decades providing mission critical networking infrastructure, um, places like air traffic control, um, train signaling power grids. And what I learned when I was here last time was that they have applied those same principles of ultra reliable networks and mission critical applications and brought it to the data center.

And I got really excited and I'm like, I have to work at this place. So here I am. All right.

Right. This is me at the Comcast knock. It's my first network engineering job.

These are the people that I think about every day. These are my people. Um, networking is hard.

It's complex. I'm working midnights at a knock. Um, everything was on fire all the time, and reliability wasn't a word that ever came to mind.

Um, I came up at a time and in an industry that, you know, it's a trope, right? Like no change Fridays and like we know that networks break. We know there's a lot of complexity.

We know that things are hard and they are falling over often, and that is not what Nokia has provided for all these years of mission critical and now data center. So this poor guy, um, that's who I think about every day as as, as we kind of, uh, move forward in this mission. So I was so compelled when I was here.

I got a job, ta-da. There's my biography on, on Nokia. I've been writing some blogs, I've been making some videos.

Uh, I'm here at my first, um, networking field day as a delegate. And I really believe in what we're doing. This isn't my first gig at a vendor, but I am super excited about what I get to work on every day, uh, because the value is real.

Um, all right, so ai, um, when I was a network engineer, AI wasn't a thing. I'm not super young. And you know, when I was there, we were copy and pasting notepad plus plus scripts that I wrote, um, into devices.

So there's a lot of talk about what is it, levels of autonomy And networking. Um, AI ops, ai, fairly confusing. I'm a pretty technical network engineer.

I guess we all are by design, but I home lab all the time, learning new stuff, doing things. I'm not like some dummy who doesn't understand technical things, but like the AI ops, genic ai, autonomous stuff, it just, it, it's very confusing and it's, and it's kind of hard to, um, for me at least to kind of get my, my head around it and, and what does it mean for us in networking? Um, so with ai, how is that going to impact that spectrum of, you know, autonomy of networks?

I, it's something I hadn't heard before joining, um, Nokia, and I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I guess there's like a levels of autonomy someplace called TM Forum. And we are mostly at like level zero, level one, like manual everything. Level one or two might be like using some light automation.

Level five, I think somebody will touch on this later, is full autonomous network operations. It's a concept that I didn't know about. I'm like, oh, cool.

Um, so I think part of what we'll see today is, uh, that continuum. What does autonomous networking mean? How are we applying things like ai, ai, agent AIOps and all that good stuff to the network and, and what does it mean for network operators?

I mean, ultimately we're just trying to make more reliable, more robust networks that are, as you know, amazing as the mission critical stuff. But bring it to data center because I'm a data center guy and it was falling over all the time, and every six months we had to replace all the stuff all the time, and it was just really hard. Um, so this is what we're gonna talk about today.

Um, genic, AIOps in action. I have had my hands on this for the past month or two. I love it.

It's amazing and I'm really excited for you to see it. Um, root cause analysis with ai, uh, we were joking, but the first time we saw this particular demo, it gave us goosebumps. We're like, whoa.

That's, that's what's so compelling for me is as we applied these tools to network contexts, I am surprised by the, what I'm surprised by what the tool can do and how it can hate, make my job easier as a network engineer and also make the networks more robust. Uh, automating ai, backend fabrics and the age of operations. That'll be, uh, the 11 industry perspective on what all this means.

Um, one more thing before I step off. The last time I was here, I'm looking at you Bruce Wallace. There was some kind of a nod or promise made to, uh, maybe Nokia supporting non Nokia hardware, and I've held them to that.

And hopefully we see a little bit of that today here.