Last week at Light Reading’s Automation Everywhere event, the Director of global platforms at Telstra, Jim Fagan, revealed in his keynote that the “path to automation is being shaped by its cloud strategy and the development of its Programmable Network”.

Fagan began his keynote explaining that, within the next three months, customers using Telstra’s Programmable Network will be able to choose bandwidth from 1MB to 10G, as well as have the option for 100G which will “soon be available”, according to Light Reading.

‘Spin up servers and manage storage’

Telstra wrote in a blog post: “The Telstra Programmable Network enables near real-time, on-demand connectivity to clouds, data centres, security, application services and a partner ecosystem through a single unified view.

“All services and infrastructure can be ordered and managed via a customer portal with a single unified view, or by customer systems interfaced via APIs, transforming the traditional networking experience to deliver control and agility to match your business demands.”

Fagan believes that the cloud was driven by the industry’s need for inexpensive computer capabilities and storage a decade ago emerged the DevOps product model, as well as the ability to spin up servers and manage storage.

‘Automating the network for Telstra’

He continued in his keynote: “We have a fully automated, homegrown, and globally available software-defined network that we call the Telstra Programmable Network.

“It’s been around for about four to five years, but the last two years is when we really started to advance it and bring it to market.

“Currently, that really is our first step to automating the network for Telstra.”

It was also important for Telstra to improve customer service through its digitisation and automation programme which was a US$1billion investment to help reduce manual processes, according to Fagan.

Written by Leah Alger