Network automation specialist NetBrain Technologies is making full-functionality licenses, or “copies” of its flagship platform available to the channel for customer demos to demonstrate the power of automation and continuous network assessment, the company told CRN exclusively.
NetBrain Next-Gen, a no-code network automation platform, gives network professionals the tools they need for troubleshooting, continuous network assessment and protected change across hybrid, multi-cloud networks. The addition of the Partner Engineer Not For Resale (NFR) license to the company’s partner program will help channel partners become recognized network automation experts in the eyes of their end customers, said Alex Alvarez (pictured), senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Partnerships for NetBrain.
“We’re really taking partner enablement to a whole other level,” he said of the new licenses.
[Related: NetBrain Channel Program Overhauled To Spur 10x Growth: Exclusive]
NetBrain said any technical person inside a partner organization can use the license to learn how to demonstrate no-code network automation to their clients. Many partners today do assessments as a regular part of their business, said Alvarez (pictured above).
“But when most people in the network operations business talk about doing assessments, they’re really talking about making a simple inventory of their network devices, a few spot checks, and [offering] some boilerplate advice. What we’re doing with our assessments is really a deep inspection of the customer’s network so we can identify potential problems with voice traffic and with firewalls that are configured incorrectly, so, really deep underlying problems that would lead to outages, breaches, or performance issues,” he said.
Giving partners access to fully functional NFR versions of NetBrain for hands-on practice, training and demos will spur the sale of more value-added services, Alvarez said.
“This ability to automate the work that network engineers do is a very advanced, holistic sale for our partners … In the follow on of doing an assessment, you get a laundry list of things that are broken in the network and that becomes a services opportunity for the partner, which they’re pretty excited about,” he said.
It also can help partners transition their customers to the idea of “continuous” network assessment.
“[That would mean] using Netbrain every day to understand how your network is deviating from the design intent in a way that would put you at risk for an outage breach, or for some performance issues,” Alvarez said.
The Burlington, Mass.-based company on Monday also introduced new Continuous Network Assessment (CNA) technology that’s available now on the NetBrain Next-Gen platform.
The Next-Gen platform lets customers automate their most common operational processes, which included incident troubleshooting, verifying network health, capacity and security conditions, detecting application delivery issues, and identifying network configurations drift and changes. It’s these daily processes that bog down network engineers, said Mark Harris, NetBrain’s senior vice president of global marketing.
“We’re at that point where the partners that dip their toe in network automation will become part of that network efficiency [plan for customers] who are thinking about: ‘How do I do this better?’ And it’s kind of the critical storm, because as workloads move to the cloud, [businesses] are being forced to think differently about how they do network automation,” Harris said.
NetBrain in 2023 launched a completely revamped version of its channel partner program, which has grown to over 200 channel partners globally. The licenses have been the most-requested feature by NetBrain’s channel partners, according to the company’s executives.
NetBrain, which does the majority of its business through the channel, counts more than 2,500 enterprises as customers today, including many Fortune 500 enterprises.