NMIS (Network Management Information System) is open source, it’s free, and it’s powerful enough to handle the majority of day-to-day network management tasks for most organizations. That’s a fact.

That means you can get real visibility and control without a commercial price tag. And when the time comes that you need more—things like compliance auditing, advanced visualization, or automation—you don’t have to start over. Plug our modules directly into NMIS, so you can build on what you already have.

That’s kind of the philosophy behind NMIS: give you a strong, capable foundation from day one, it’s basic but powerful and when set up correctly can truly be the workhorse to help you tame the network.

More Than Enough for Most Organizations

Across thousands of deployments, NMIS9 consistently covers more than 80% of what most organizations need. Out of the box, you’ll find performance monitoring, fault management, configuration visibility, and reporting that stack up against many commercial platforms.

For a lot of teams, NMIS alone is more than enough. And because it’s open source, there are no license restrictions, hidden costs, or artificial limits on scaling. Monitor as much as you need, on your terms.

Built to Work With Any Device

Networks aren’t uniform. And in today’s networks, that we see that can’t be any truer. A kaleidoscope of routers, switches, firewalls, servers, wireless controllers, cloud(s) platforms, and more. NMIS is designed to work across that diversity.

Its adaptable data model and extensive device library mean it can talk to just about anything on your network—regardless of vendor. Instead of juggling multiple tools, NMIS gives you one central platform that sees the whole picture.

Real Data, Real Insight

Knowing whether a device is up or down is the bare minimum. NMIS goes deeper, pulling in detailed metrics and turning them into insights you can act on.

With configurable thresholds and trend analysis, NMIS helps you identify issues early, optimize performance, and avoid outages. It’s the kind of visibility that makes network operations easier and decision-making sharper.

Growing With You

We maintain NMIS open source for the global networking community. We keep it updated, add support for new devices, and help organizations get the most out of their deployments.

And when you need more, our modules are ready to extend NMIS even further. Each one integrates directly into your NMIS environment:

• opEvents – powerful event and alert management to streamline troubleshooting and response.

• opConfig – configuration monitoring and compliance, helping you stay on top of changes across your network.

• opCharts – rich data visualization and custom dashboards, making complex information easy to understand and act on.

Together, these modules bring enterprise-grade capabilities while letting you keep NMIS as the foundation. You only add what you need, when you need it—without disrupting what’s already working.

Why Free Matters

In a market crowded with expensive solutions, NMIS proves that free doesn’t mean limited. It means accessible, adaptable, and supported by a community—and by us at FirstWave.

A truly free Network Management Information System exists. And it’s ready to run on your network today.

If you’ve ever had a user call in and say “I can’t connect, but the guy next to me can”, you already know the frustration of a duplicate IP address. It’s one of those problems that seems minor until it hits a critical server, a printer fleet, or worse, your DHCP infrastructure—and suddenly half the office is offline.

Duplicate IP conflicts are sneaky. They’re not a glamorous cyberattack or a dramatic hardware failure. They’re usually caused by something small—a mis-configured static IP, overlapping DHCP scopes, or an IoT device that didn’t release its lease. But the impact? Hours of downtime, productivity lost, security gaps, and a lot of hair-pulling while you hunt through logs.

That’s why serious network teams rely on a duplicate IP scanner. Think of it as an early-warning system that flags conflicts before they escalate, so you spend less time firefighting and more time keeping the business running. (Which is precisely what FirstWave excels in!)

Why Duplicate IPs Happen (and Why They’re Worse Now)

In the past, when your network was a handful of switches, a DHCP server, and some desktops, duplicate IPs were manageable. Today? Networks look like patchworks:

• Hybrid environments mix on-premises, multi-cloud, and remote access.

• IoT and BYOD are adding thousands of devices with varying behaviors.

• Virtual machines and containers are spinning up and down faster than DHCP can blink.

All of these make duplicate IPs less of an “if” and more of a “when.” And when they happen, they don’t just knock one laptop offline—they can knock out:

• A payroll server during end-of-month.

• A VoIP system in the middle of client calls.

• A VPN gateway that remote staff rely on.

The cost isn’t just downtime—it’s lost trust from your users, unnecessary overtime for IT, and potential compliance violations if service availability is mandated.

How a Duplicate IP Scanner Actually Helps

Yes, you could manually check ARP tables, log into switches, or walk the floor with a packet sniffer. But those methods don’t scale.

A duplicate IP scanner automates this grunt work:

1. Scans your ranges to see who’s alive and what IP they claim.

2. Flags conflicts in real time—before users start raising tickets.

3. Ties into your DHCP/DNS/IPAM stack, so you’re not just reacting, you’re fixing.

It’s the difference between waiting for smoke to set off the fire alarm vs. having sensors that detect a spark before it catches.

Features That Actually Matter

Many tools claim to scan for duplicate IP addresses, but what makes them usable in a real operational environment, you ask? That’s why you want to ensure that when you’re looking at software, you check off these big-ticket items. They should, at a minimum, provide you with these fundamentals; otherwise, you should probably move on.

• Real-time alerts you can act on (email, syslog, dashboard)—not just a static report.

• Automated network mapping so you can see conflicts across subnets.

• Integration with DHCP/DNS/IPAM for automated remediation.

• Scalability—can it handle 200 devices, or 200,000?

• Audit-ready reporting for when management asks, “Why did we go down last week?”

If a scanner doesn’t check those boxes, it’s probably just another tool that clogs your toolkit instead of helping.

The Payoff for Network Teams

Here’s the real-world upside you get from deploying a duplicate IP scanner:

• Less downtime: Conflicts are caught before they cascade into outages.

• Faster troubleshooting: No more ghost hunts across VLANs.

• Cleaner compliance posture: Easier reporting for ISO, PCI, HIPAA, or SOC audits.

• Better resource use: Free up hours of IT time that can go into projects instead of firefights.

Most importantly—it buys you credibility with your users. When they stop experiencing random connectivity blackouts, they notice.

Best Practices from the Field

A scanner is only as good as the way you use it. To get maximum ROI:

• Schedule recurring scans or enable continuous monitoring. Conflicts don’t happen on a schedule.

• Integrate with your existing stack—whether that’s SolarWinds, Open-AudIT, OPConfig, or custom scripts.

• Baseline your network so you know what “healthy” looks like. That way, when duplicates pop up, they stand out.

• Train your team—ensure the help desk knows how to escalate when an alert is received.

Why opAddress Stands Out

Plenty of tools can ping a subnet. But opAddress goes further because it’s not just a duplicate IP scanner—it’s a full IP address management (IPAM) platform.

With opAddress you get:

• Track duplicate IP detection with real-time alerts.

• Automated network mapping that gives you visibility across subnets.

• Tight integration with Open-AudIT and opConfig for a complete compliance and configuration picture.

• Enterprise scalability that works in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

• Audit-ready reporting out of the box.

That means you’re not just spotting conflicts—you’re preventing them from happening again, because you finally have a single source of truth for IP address allocation.

Duplicate IP conflicts are one of those “small” problems that can bring entire networks to a halt. And they’re only getting more common as networks grow more complex (Thank Big AI for that).

A duplicate IP scanner isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s table stakes for modern network management.

If you want to avoid conflicts instead of cleaning up after them, it’s time to put a purpose-built tool in place.

👉 See how opAddress can eliminate duplicate IP headaches before they hit your users.

Exciting news from your local traffic management Evangelist!

STM has a revamped UIX with a whole new look, feel, and has added some new features.

Pages are now more open, less cluttered, with easier access to the features you want. And most importantly for the NOC operators, we have added Dark Mode. Feel free to give it a try by upgrading to the latest STM version 8.0.1 b12752.

The new interface can be accessed by using port 5001 or 5030 in your browser. The classic interface remains untouched at port 5000.

STM Dashboard

Before (Classic Interface)

After (Revamped Interface)

STM Overview

Before (Classic Overview)

After (Revamped Overview)

Thank you for contacting Support at FirstWave.

For us to assist you in creating a case, you will need to:

1. Create a FirstWave Support Jira Account
2. Log a FirstWave Support Ticket

For any assistance or inquiries, reach out to us at
support@firstwave.com.

Discover how this central communication system enables you to scale and decouple your communication in a distributed network architecture.

As businesses increasingly rely on distributed systems and microservices to serve their growing networks, effective communication between their different components becomes more challenging.

Enter message bus, or enterprise service bus: a communication system enabling seamless data exchange between network components to help you manage your distributed network.

In this blog, we’ll break down the concept of a message bus architecture, explaining how it works, its core features, available alternatives, and the benefits that a message bus solution like FirstWave opHA-MB brings to distributed systems.

Table of Contents

• What is message bus?
• Key components of a message bus architecture
• The benefits of message bus
• Common use cases for message bus technology
• Alternatives to message bus
• When to use which architecture
• The ultimate message bus solution: opHA Message Bus

What is message bus?

Imagine a bustling city with numerous neighborhoods, each representing a different application or service. To keep the city running smoothly, these neighborhoods need to exchange information efficiently.

A message bus acts like the city’s central transit system, ensuring messages are delivered to the right destinations without requiring any direct connections between them. In technical terms, the message bus enables different applications, services, or systems to communicate by transmitting messages through a shared infrastructure.

This setup ensures that each component remains independent for flexibility and scalability.

Key components of a message bus architecture

1. Producers (pollers)

Also known as peers, pollers collect data from various network devices and systems, generating messages that contain critical information about network performance, events, and statuses. These pollers can be scaled horizontally or vertically for efficient data collection across expansive networks.

2. Broker (message bus)

Serving as the central communication hub, the message bus ensures real-time synchronization among multiple pollers. It manages the routing of messages from producers to consumers, maintaining data integrity through message replication across three nodes, which allows the system to tolerate single-node failures.

3. Consumers (primary server and applications)

The primary server and associated applications function as consumers. They receive and process messages relayed by the message bus, providing users with a consolidated, real-time view of network health and performance. This setup enhances capabilities like event logging, monitoring, and the generation of intuitive dashboards and reports.

A message bus decouples communication, instead allowing senders and receivers to operate independently so network communication can happen asynchronously. This means users can manage distributed network systems via a central point that standardizes disparate communication styles. The result: a simple, integrated system.

The benefits of message bus

A message bus architecture is useful for businesses managing large-scale, distributed, multi-customer, and/or mission-critical networks, as data is freely available to travel between endpoints as needed.

• Multi-tenancy support: Especially for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), managing multiple clients efficiently is critical. A message bus architecture is designed for multi-tenancy, allowing MSPs to handle multiple customer environments within a single infrastructure.
• Fault tolerance: To ensure uninterrupted operations, many message buses (including opHA Message Bus) are built with fault tolerance and redundancy mechanisms that keep services running even if individual components fail.
• Flexibility: Scale your architecture with minimal configuration as decoupled components can operate and change independently. Easily handle high-traffic scenarios with the ability to distribute single messages across multiple consumers.
• Managed distribution: Message bus solves the problem of temporal decoupling, as peers and the primary do not need to be online simultaneously for the system to work. Messages can also be delivered in either single, group, or broadcast models.
• Reduced delays: Receive events to the primary system in real time, and process new events with minimal to no downtime.
• No API calls: Unlike traditional communication, where both services must be available simultaneously, a message bus can communicate at any time as well as rapidly push inventory updates.
• Reliability: Messages can be stored temporarily to prevent data loss, and retry mechanisms are supported if a consumer fails.
• Security: Authentication can be configured to control who sends and receives messages, and encryption can (and should) be incorporated to maintain secure communication.
• Monitoring: Track message flows for debugging, auditing, and performance monitoring.

Common use cases for message bus technology

1. Microservices architecture

In modern network management and cybersecurity environments, different services handle distinct functions—such as network monitoring, security alerts, performance analytics, and automation workflows—while seamlessly communicating with each other. A good message bus acts as the backbone for this communication, ensuring that services remain loosely coupled, scalable, and resilient in distributed architectures.

Network management benefits for microservices include:

• Seamless data flow: Ensures real-time data exchange between network monitoring tools, security systems, and reporting dashboards.
• Scalability: Allows IT teams and MSPs to add or modify monitoring components without affecting the entire system.
• Reduced latency and bottlenecks: Distributes network event data efficiently, preventing system slowdowns.
• Asynchronous processing: Enables automated alerts, log analysis, and device polling without delays.

2. Event-driven systems

Modern applications rely on real-time event processing to improve responsiveness and automation. A message bus is a core component of event-driven architectures, where events (e.g., user actions, system changes, external triggers) are published and consumed dynamically.

Where it’s useful:

• IoT networks: Devices publish sensor data, and analytics engines process it instantly.
• Cybersecurity monitoring: Suspicious activity is flagged and sent to security systems in real time.
• Finance and banking: Fraud detection systems react instantly to unusual transactions.

Alternatives to message bus

Alternatives to a message bus are usually point-to-point based, where services communicate directly rather than via a central interconnected point.

Point-to-point communication has its benefits, but it does limit your capabilities in that it silos data between sender and receiver, preventing cross-communication which can limit efficiency in more complex architectures.

But the good news is that you’re not just limited to one option; your distributed system can use a combination of communication styles for different functions to optimize its efficiency for your business.

APIs

APIs are a tightly coupled solution where each of your services need to know about each of your endpoints. With APIs, each service manages its own connections. This approach is ideal for simpler architectures or where latency isn’t a major consideration.

Pros:

• Suits synchronous interactions: APIs work when a service needs an immediate response and can’t be held or queued.
• Easy to implement: APIs are ideal in small-scale applications where adding a message bus would be overkill.
• Easy to integrate: APIs allow messages to be externally exposed to public or partner systems through simple calls.

Cons:

• Failure recovery challenges: Failure recovery mechanisms are harder to implement as services handle errors individually.
• Request bottlenecks: Too many requests can overload an API-driven system, leading to delays or failures.
• Limited scalability: API-driven systems are difficult to scale as each service directly communicates with others, increasing management complexity.
• Workflow issues: Performance and reliability suffer in asynchronous workflows like order processing or event-driven systems.
• High-throughput limitations: High-throughput systems that need decoupling and scalability can’t be supported, as each service manages its own connections.

Message queuing

A message queue is similar to a message bus, but they differ in how messages are routed and processed. Unlike a message bus, a message queue uses point-to-point communication and messages are prioritized by first in, first out. Once consumed, the message is simply removed from the queue.

Pros:

• Simple security: One-to-one messaging circumvents the need to implement encryption or similar security measures.
• Easy to implement: Ideal for task-based workflows, background jobs, or small applications with a clear producer-consumer relationship.
• Message durability: Messages can be persisted in the queue, ensuring they’re not lost even if the consumer is unavailable.

Cons:

• Limited communication: No built-in publish-subscribe model is available, limiting communication to one-to-one scenarios.
• No prioritization: There is no ability to prioritize or triage messages.
• Complex management: Managing message queues becomes more difficult at scale, and eventually totally inefficient.
• Potential for bottlenecks: With no ability to prioritize or triage messages, important messages can pile up in a queue if a consumer is overwhelmed or unavailable.

When to use which architecture

• APIs provide a tightly coupled solution, where each of your services need to know about each of your endpoints. If you use them on your own, you’re limited by point-to-point communication only, but APIs can form a useful part of a larger combination of communication architectures.
• Message queuing can be easy to implement for simple networks that manage only task-based workflows and point-to-point communication. But they’re not always easy to manage, as queue-based solutions typically require monitoring to ensure the queue doesn’t come too large, creating a bottleneck. They also require some form of orchestration to handle message processing.
• A message bus architecture is best suited for event-driven architectures, real-time updates, and systems where messages need to be broadcast to multiple consumers, e.g. notification systems, microservices communication. Message bus is also ideal for its ability to scale with your network as it grows over time, and integrates more complex or mission-critical communication systems.

If you have the time to implement and manage them all efficiently, you can use a message bus alongside other communication methods to expand your feature scope and optimize your setup for different use cases.

Some single providers will provide all of these functionalities in-house to make your journey even easier; for example, in addition to FirstWave’s opHA Message Bus solution, we also provide APIs to allow for message transfers, as well as integrate with queue-based message brokers such as RabbitMQ – all combined with hands-on expert support to make implementation easy.

Which is right for me?

To help you choose the best design (or combination of designs) for your business, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do we require or would we benefit from event-driven architecture?
• What level of decoupling do we need? Which services (if any) need the ability to communicate asynchronously?
• How critical is real-time communication? Do we need instant responses, near real-time event-driven updates, or delayed processing?
• What is our expected message volume and load on our services?
• How will we build resilience into our network? Do we need fault-tolerant messaging or constant availability?
• How important is scalability now, and what are our long-term growth plans?
• How do we plan to adopt AI or ML into our network, and how do we expect this to impact our network communication patterns?

The ultimate message bus solution: opHA Message Bus

opHA Message Bus (opHA-MB) is FirstWave’s own message bus solution, enabling you to simplify management of your distributed network systems with real-time data transfer across diverse and multi-tenanted environments.

This advanced network management solution acts as the central nervous system to your network to help you maintain optimal network performance, ensure resilience, and swiftly resolve the issues that come with complex network infrastructure.

How messages flow through opHA-MB

• Generating messages: Pollers collect data from network devices and generate messages containing key information.
• Publishing to the bus: These messages are sent to opHA-MB, which acts as the central broker.
• Smart routing: opHA-MB identifies which applications or services (consumers) need the data and directs messages accordingly.
• Processing and action: Consumers, such as the primary server, opCharts, and opEvents, receive the messages, process the data, and trigger the necessary actions, such as alerts or dashboard updates.

By keeping producers and consumers decoupled, this architecture allows each component to function independently. This improves flexibility, scalability, and resilience—ensuring efficient network management even as demands grow.

Features of opHA-MB

• Multi-tenancy: Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can easily manage multiple tenants with a single, configurable interface.
• Real-time communication and event management: Reduce data transfer times with real-time sync between multiple pollers, and enhance Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) with immediate event notifications from pollers to the primary server.
• Fault tolerance: Ensure data integrity with message replication across three nodes, tolerating single-node failures.
• Multi-server architecture: Distribute the server load to multiple pollers for efficient data collection and processing.
• Provisioning management: Simplify platform provisioning with push changes and new poller deployment at the click of a button.
• Scaling for high availability: Scale pollers horizontally or vertically with mirroring to improve availability, redundancy, and flexibility across your architecture.
• Integration with FirstWave products: opHA-MB is designed to work seamlessly with other FirstWave products, including opEvents and opCharts, to  enhance your network management capabilities.

Key benefits of opHA-MB

• Unparalleled network visibility: Gain instant insights into your network with immediate event updates, empowering proactive issue resolution.
• Enhanced network resilience: Minimize downtime and ensure uninterrupted service delivery with automated failover mechanisms and resilient event transfer.
• Event prioritization: When you use opHA-MB as part of your FirstWave suite of solutions, your data is prioritized by our software to enable intuitive event prioritization with real-time notifications, so you can address the events that matter most to your business.
• Streamlined network management: Reduce manual intervention and optimize network management tasks with automated event processing and centralized data management.
• Scalable and flexible architecture: Grow your architecture with your business and make changes as needed, with the ability to scale pollers horizontally or vertically.
• Reduced delays: Receive events to your primary system in real time to process new events with minimal to no downtime, as well as zero event loss in high-traffic environments.
• No API calls: Push inventory updates to multiple systems instantly and automatically.

Learn more about opHA-MB

By activating the Virtual Operator feature in the NMIS opConfig module, IT managers can empower their team to proactively address common network issues, ensuring optimal performance, security, and compliance.

The virtual operator can:

• Troubleshoot common issues automatically. No more sifting through logs or waiting for expert assistance. They can diagnose and resolve common network problems instantly.
• Always follow best practice procedures for network security. Because they follow a script that you create, compliance with industry standards and regulations is pre-defined by you, removing human error and leaving you confident in your network’s safety.
• Help your team move from reactive to proactive network management. Reduce errors, increase performance, and free up valuable time for strategic initiatives.

The Evolution of Network Operations – from Manual to Virtual

The landscape of network operations has been undergoing a radical transformation.

Traditionally, managing networks involved a predominantly manual approach, relying heavily on human expertise and intervention to address issues, configure devices, and ensure optimal performance. Human error, time-consuming processes, and the inability to scale effectively in the face of growing network complexity posed significant challenges to traditional network management practices.

In the past decade, network monitoring and management platforms have become more intelligent, with advances in big data providing greater insights into a network environment, how and when it is accessed, what devices are used and when, which services are performing optimally, and which services are degrading.

According to the Gartner Market Guide to Network Automation, while more than 65% of enterprise networking activities are performed manually across SME’s, a growing percentage of large enterprises automate more than half of their network activities.

Firstwave Cloud Technology has been at the forefront of this new era of machine intelligence, gathering and analysing network data to provide advanced anomaly detection and predictive analytics that allows operators to proactively manage infrastructure and devices to ensure a healthy and predictable network environment.

With the introduction of the Virtual Operator, this machine intelligence goes a level deeper, allowing the NMIS platform to take action on insights and allowing operators to script a series of activities that the operator can perform at the touch of a button.

This article delves more deeply into the concept of the Virtual Operator, exploring its benefits and potential impact on an organisation’s network automation strategy.  We will examine how automation, through the implementation of a Virtual Operator, is reimagining network administration, driving efficiency, enhancing security, and unlocking new levels of performance and insights.

What is the Virtual Operator?

The Virtual Operator, is a software agent designed to automate repetitive tasks, optimise network performance, and provide intelligent insights. It functions as a rule-based engine that learns from historical data, network configurations, and best practices, allowing it to make informed decisions and take proactive actions to maintain network stability and efficiency.

Think of a Virtual Operator as a highly specialised AI assistant tailored for network administration. It acts like an extension of the network team, taking on the mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing up human engineers to focus on more strategic and complex challenges.

Benefits of implementing a Virtual Operator

The implementation of a Virtual Operator offers several key benefits to network administration teams:

1. Human Resource Optimisation

By automating routine tasks, the Virtual Operator can free up engineers to focus on more strategic and complex challenges. This shift allows teams to maximise human talent, enabling them to tackle innovation, problem-solving, and the implementation of new technologies.

2. Improved Network Efficiency and Performance

The Virtual Operator in conjunction with the broader opConfig and opEvents module can continuously monitor network performance, identify potential issues, and proactively take corrective actions. This pre-emptive approach ensures optimal network performance, minimising downtime, and maximising resource utilisation.

3. Enhanced Security and Compliance

The Virtual Operator can implement and enforce security policies, detect anomalies, and respond to security threats in real-time. This automated approach strengthens network security, improves compliance with industry regulations, and reduces the risk of security breaches.

4. Data-Driven Decision Making

Virtual Operators leverage vast amounts of network data to gain valuable insights and optimise network configurations. These insights empower network teams to make informed decisions based on real-time data, leading to more effective resource allocation and network optimisation.

Use Case:  Managed Service Providers

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often manage multiple client networks simultaneously. This can be a resource-intensive task, particularly when dealing with routine maintenance and troubleshooting. The Virtual Operator offers a solution to this challenge by automating many of the routine tasks that MSPs typically perform.

For example, a MSP can use the Virtual Operator to automate the process of applying security patches across multiple client networks. The Virtual Operator can execute the necessary commands to apply the patches, run tests to ensure that the patches have been applied correctly, and report any issues that arise. This not only reduces the workload for the MSP’s engineers but also ensures that the patches are applied consistently and without errors.

Use Case: Hybrid Networks

The Virtual Operator simplifies the management of hybrid networks by automating the tasks required to maintain connectivity and performance.

For example, the Virtual Operator can automatically adjust network configurations to optimise performance as workloads shift between on-premise and cloud environments. It can also monitor network traffic for potential issues and make adjustments in real-time to prevent disruptions. This level of automation ensures that hybrid networks operate smoothly and efficiently, even as conditions change .

How Businesses can expand their Network Automation beyond the Virtual Operator

The adoption of the Virtual Operator for network administration presents a key stepping stone towards the future of network automation for IT teams.  How can a business expand the effectiveness of Virtual Operator and what new developments can we expect to see as network automation technology further evolves?

1. Increased Automation and Self-Healing Networks

Use of the Virtual Operator alongside other modules such as opEvents, opTrend and Open-Audit will drive further automation in network management, eventually enabling self-healing networks that can identify and resolve issues without human intervention. This will lead to more resilient, reliable, and efficient network infrastructure.

2. Enhanced Network Intelligence and Analytics

The use of the Virtual Operator to routinely check network health will play a critical role in advancing network intelligence, enabling teams to gain deeper insights into network performance, security threats, and user behaviour. This will empower teams to make more informed decisions and proactively optimise their networks.

3. Evolution of Network Administration Roles

Eventually, the use of network automation tools such as the Virtual Operator will transform the role of network administrators and engineers, shifting their focus from routine tasks to more strategic and creative activities. They will become more involved in AI model development and instructional writing, data analysis, and the design of intelligent network solutions.

Conclusion

The Virtual Operator represents a significant step forward in network automation, leveraging the power of AI to enhance network performance, optimise operations, and free up human resources for more strategic tasks. As AI and automation continue to advance, features like the Virtual Operator will play an increasingly crucial role in enabling more intelligent, efficient, and resilient network infrastructure.

Reference:

Gartner 2023 Market Guide to Network Automation

https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4913231