‘My implementation timeline has been reduced significantly. You’re basically faster and cheaper, and you have a happy customer,’ one MSP using the new Nile Nav app tells CRN.
AI-powered Nile Nav will let qualified partners and end customers design, deploy and manage its Campus Network-as-a-Service offering, Nile Access Service, with more precision, more quickly, taking the deployment time from weeks or months for traditional network architectures to days with improved accuracy, the startup told CRN.
Nile alongside the mobile app is also revealing a new training and qualification program, Nile Academy, for its partners and customers using Nile Nav.
[Related: Legacy Networking Throwdown: Nile Launches AI Networking Services Platform]
The app can be used by partners and end customers to not only speed deployment of NaaS, but by also automating the entirety of the network life cycle. The app addresses that stem from design and deployment that impact about 60 percent of network issues, said Andrew Froelich, director of solutions marketing for Nile.
“The Nav app significantly streamlines and automates a large number of life-cycle tasks. A lot of manual processes go into the design and deployment process, and ultimately what ends up happening is, for whatever reason, the network [enterprises] build does not deliver on the performance, the reliability or the scalability that they envision. That’s the real driver behind why we built Nile Nav,” he told CRN.
The new training and qualification program training that’s being announced alongside the app will give partners and end customers the knowledge and skills they need to design and build secure, high-performance networks based on the Nile architecture and Nile Access Service, the company said.
The qualification training, which is needed for use of Nile Nav, takes three hours or less per track and can be used by those with no previous experience or expertise in designing and deploying enterprise networks, Froelich said.
“These tools and this training program are intended to be used by technicians and installers, many of them being our partners,” Froelich said. “This will help our partner community to really bring in design teams and installers much more quickly and will give these partners the confidence to know that they have installed Nile solutions properly.”
Nile Nav will help enterprises by arming them with improved visibility into installer availability, job status and deployment progress, help with ongoing operations by providing real-time insight into the health of Nile hardware and visibility into the status of component replacements, as well as increased productivity by automating routine tasks and providing installers with actionable real-time insight, resources and AI-powered design validation checks, the company said.
New York City-based MSP Driven Technologies is leading with Nile when addressing many of its customers’’networking inquires. The zero-trust-based NaaS provider’s offerings are especially well-suited for K-12, higher education and health-care customers, according to Vinu Thomas, COO of New York City-based MSP Driven Technologies.
Driven has been test-driving the new app, which is helping to further simplify—and remove some costs — -from network management for the MSP, Thomas said.
“I can essentially send a low-cost, Level 1 technician with the app and the app is basically guiding them through every single step, including where to physically install the switches and access points. It’s almost as simple as unlocking or unboxing an Apple iPhone and the app guides you through the step-by-step process. The implementation is stress-free,” he said.
With the amount of AI built into the offering, the chances of making “expensive” mistakes are greatly reduced, Thomas said.
“”f you make any missteps, the [app] is able to fix it and there’s real-time information that we are able to track. My implementation timeline has been reduced significantly. You’re basically faster and cheaper, and you have a happy customer,” he said.
Nile is delivering NaaS, not a product, like many networking competitors. With that comes a lot of responsibility, said Karthik Kannan, head of product management for Nile.
“The deployment has to be faster, but also accurate. It’s that balance that we have to do and we are taking on both of [those]. That is necessary so that we can guarantee the outcomes for our customers and partners,” Kannan said.
Nile in March launched its full-fledged AI services platform for automating network design, configuration and management. The platform included the Nile Services Cloud for AI-based network design; the Nile Service Blocks, which automates network deployment including access point configuration; and Nile Copilot and Nile Autopilot applications for AI-based network monitoring and operations.
