The following blog was adapted from the transcripts of a video series. To view the videos, please click on the link at the bottom of the blog.
What Is Virtuora AX Network Coach?
1Finity’s Virtuora AX Network Coach is our Generative AI tool that’s powered by a Large Language Model (LLM). Network Coach integrates with other tools and services within the Virtuora portfolio. It’s really going to be able to provide simplicity and help manage the complexity of operating modern networks. With Network Coach, there will be some initial use cases where you can query vast amounts of technical publications, from the admin and user guides to the release notes. And then be able to query against all those at once, to make it quicker to find the information you’re really looking for. In addition to being able to access data from the network, whether it’s the inventory or the alarm list or an event stream or device logs, Network Coach can assist operators in managing the complexity that comes with those data sets.
How Does Network Coach Improve Efficiency?
Network Coach can improve efficiency for network operators and people interfacing with the network. First, let’s think about a Network Operations Center (NOC) or a Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineer who’s troubleshooting an issue in the network. Maybe they’re using a tool like Virtuora Accelerated RCA (Root Cause Analysis), which will pinpoint to the specific event or issue that’s causing the outage. But then what? Now they have to take the next steps and Network Coach is going to provide recommendations on how to resolve the issue. Network Coach will bring in those steps and comb through the dense data that may be coming from the documents plus experience or tribal knowledge in a way that can be combined and brought clearly and well organized to the NOC operator. And then sometimes, if you need to dig really deep, you want to get into device logs, which can be very complicated and can take a lot of manual effort to comb through. The Large Language Models (LLM) in Network Coach are good at going through that depth of data, and they can find anomalies or pinpoint differences between sets of logs. This will be really beneficial for the NOC and TAC engineers.
You can also think about a network design engineer who wants to look at their network and find high congestion as well as bottlenecks. Or they may want to know when they need to do a rebuild. The operator can take information, like service inventory and topology, and then Network Coach will be able to help assess and identify where those issues are and where the operator should focus their efforts. And then the operator can select the right service, the right buildout, and the right products to address the congestion. Giving Network Coach access to those technical documents and bringing that into the problem is going to help the network design engineers. Many people that interface with the network and 1Finity components are going to see benefit from Network Coach.
What Makes Virtuora AX Network Coach Unique?
There are a few things that make Network Coach unique. First of all, you have to think about 1Finity and our decades of experience operating, building, and designing networks. We have a treasure trove of artifacts and data that we’ve captured over the years that has enabled us to build a unique, network operator-focused Generative AI tool. This will take from that documentation and bring our experience to give more relevant and accurate answers to our users and customers. Secondly, we have unique data extraction adapters built into Network Coach because it’s not just about the technical publications or maybe the unstructured data that you would see in more generic types of Generative AI tools. We also have data types, like device log data, which can be very unique in the way it’s structured. And we’ve built special knowledge extraction tools to be able to take that and bring it into Network Coach so that it can be used by the network operators.
Another element that’s going to make Network Coach unique is 1Finity. As part of the larger Fujitsu family, we get to see technology that’s coming in from other industries. While other industries may be advancing in a certain technology or toolset, we bring those in where they apply to the networking, network operator, and telecommunications space. That’s going to help us evolve Network Coach very quickly as these new technologies become available and this area is advancing very quickly. We want to take a step-by-step approach when introducing these new technologies since these systems are mission critical. The adoption of new technology always has some risk and hesitancy. And there’s also a component of ensuring profitability every time you on-board a new project, which is why we’re taking a very milestone-based and step-by-step implementation of new technology. We want each new technology to have its own positive return on investment and its own unique business case that we can deliver to the customer. You don’t have to bring in a big platform and wait for a return several years from now. We want to bring bite-sized, new technology packages and use cases that are going to deliver a return on that investment very quickly.
Why Is It Called Network Coach?
Naming is always a fun part of the job, and everyone has an opinion about the name. The generic term for these types of applications is actually a copilot, even though I know that’s the brand name for another product. We wanted to differentiate from that, and so “Network” is self-explanatory. It’s where we fit in the marketplace. But when you think about working with these tools, you may want more than an assistant, but where the user is still involved. There is a human involved in this process. Coaching says that you’re getting support and guidance, rather than something automating without your control or something that’s assisting and waiting for you to provide input. With 1Finity’s Virtuora AX Network Coach, you have a guide or a coach along the way.
