Glue Networks announced a major upgrade to Gluware.

With this enhancement, network engineers can automate their brownfield multi-vendor network architectures, while providing enterprises with control, security and awareness of the network state.

Gluware is now available in both cloud-based and on-prem versions for large enterprises that require a behind-the-firewall implementation.

To amplify custom solution development, the company also announced the release of a Community Edition for Gluware Lab. This enterprise-ready network development environment allows network engineers to discover new solutions and accelerate roll-outs by leveraging pre-built, multi-vendor solution packages for a wide variety of use cases.

While networking vendors have been attempting to automate their own products with varying degrees of success, no competitive company has created a credible solution to automate across vendors and deliver enterprises the automation and orchestration they require to achieve agility throughout their networks. Many solutions only target one area of the network (eg. the Data Center), but do not provide a holistic automation capability for the enterprise.

With Gluware, enterprises can rapidly move from concept to production deployment in minutes using Gluware Lab to validate the network model, and then publish to production for use in Gluware Control for advanced orchestration and life-cycle management.

The benefits of Gluware for users are:

• Simplify network complexity across the data center, WAN and LAN. The latest release of Gluware supports thirteen initial vendor solution packages for multiple device vendors and types including A10 Networks load balancers (ACOS), Cisco routers (IOS, IOS-XE), Cisco switches (IOS, IOS-XE), Fortinet firewalls (FortiOS), Palo Alto firewalls (PANOS) and Riverbed WAN accelerators (RiOS). The Gluware Community edition will be updated this summer with Arista switches (EOS), Cisco (NXOS, ACI), F5 load balancers (TMOS), and Juniper routers (JunOS)

• Boost network agility through brownfield automation. Gluware allows the addition of automation to the enterprise without the need to rip and replace or add new hardware, while providing additional solution packages for any combination of vendors or architectures

• Control network evolution and automate any device — now enhanced with Gluware Community. With Gluware Lab and its integrated Dynamic NDK (Network Development Kit), network engineers can create and customize open standards-based network data models, leveraging automated GUI workflow form generation and network state configuration storage to rapidly validate those models for production rollout and life-cycle management with Gluware Control

• On-prem installation added to cloud-based Gluware. Customers have the option to choose between an on-prem installation or a hosted cloud-based version depending on their specific security or privacy needs

• Proven in global production to massively reduce network lifecycle costs. Gluware has achieved millions of dollars in cost savings per customer while dramatically increasing agility for enterprises to respond to business needs

Jeff Gray, CEO and co-founder, Glue Networks said: “As businesses struggle to keep up with the constant challenges of the digital era, remaining agile while saving costs is placing extreme pressure on network engineers. While SDN is seen as a cost-saving mechanism by the C-suite, it also creates its own issues for engineers tasked with implementing it across a multi-vendor network landscape. With the latest version of Gluware, and the Gluware Community, we believe that we have created a solution that will enable the agility the C-suite is looking for, while providing a key element to help network engineers orchestrate multi-vendor networks quickly and seamlessly.”

Peter Christy, Research Director, 451 Research, said: “SDN concepts have begun to transform the enterprise network but have done so by finding ways to use a relatively static and unchanging legacy physical network for data transport. The approach has been somewhat successful in the data center but is more limited in campus and wide-area networks with more heterogeneity and complexity. Glue Networks has been a pioneer and market leader in the practical automation of the complete network including the ‘brownfield’ physical networks in use today by enterprises and service providers and by doing so is providing tools that finally enable the much needed orchestration and automation of the complete enterprise network from the SDN overlay down to the communication link.”