Enterprise networks are being asked to support more volatile, data-intensive workloads as businesses bring AI into everyday operations.
Three recent announcements show vendors responding in different ways: using AI to speed up incident investigation, joining network data across telecom operations and making internet capacity more flexible.
Last week, Riverbed announced a network performance management offering that combines its observability products with AI-driven analysis and automation.
The offer brings together AppResponse for packet capture and analysis, NetProfiler for flow monitoring and analytics, and NPM+, which extends network visibility to endpoint environments, Zero Trust architectures and public-cloud services.
At its centre is Riverbed IQ, a SaaS-based intelligence layer that applies causal, predictive, generative and agentic AI to connected operational data. Riverbed Q, a conversational assistant, allows teams to query that data using natural language.
Riverbed said NPM 360 is available immediately and will initially be offered at no additional cost to existing AppResponse and NetProfiler customers.
“For decades, network monitoring tools have surfaced the evidence, but network professionals have still had to manually connect the dots,” said Richard Tworek, Riverbed’s Chief Technology Officer.
The company argues that its approach can help NetOps teams move from manual and reactive investigations towards faster root-cause identification, recommended next actions and, eventually, more autonomous operations.
That ambition will be familiar to service teams. The key question is whether AI-assisted recommendations retain enough underlying evidence and human oversight for engineers to verify a decision before it affects users or services.
Nokia and Microsoft Join Up on Telecom Data
On 17 September, Nokia and Microsoft announced an expansion of their partnership designed to support agentic network automation for telecom operators.
The companies are combining Nokia Data Suite, which provides ready-to-use telecom data products, with Microsoft Fabric’s analytics, governance and AI capabilities.
The aim is to give operators a common data foundation across multi-vendor and cross-domain environments, including on-premises, hybrid and cloud deployments.
