Palo Alto Networks Inc. today introduced two new networking appliances for corporate offices and edge locations, along with artificial intelligence technology that it says can automatically fix technical issues.

Publicly traded Palo Alto Networks is best known as a provider of cybersecurity products. Last year, the company jumped into the network management business by acquiring CloudGenix Inc. for $420 million. The new appliances and AI technology both have CloudGenix’s network management software at their foundation.

The two appliances each target a different set of environments. The Ion 1000 is designed for connecting retail stores and other edge sites to the centralized wide-area network that links a company’s disparate locations. It’s joined by the CloudGenix Ion 9000, the largest CloudGenix appliance to date, which Palo Alto Networks is targeting at bigger locations such as corporate headquarters.

The new AI features, in turn, focus on easing network troubleshooting. A common troubleshooting challenge is that maintenance tools tend to generate a large number of  alerts for technical issues, which makes it difficult to piece together a picture of the root cause. According to Palo Alto Networks, the AI technology it has added to CloudGenix can automatically group alerts tied to a common root cause to increase the speed with which administrators can implement the fix.

The technology is also capable of fixing some performance issues on its own. Palo Alto Networks is making the bold claim that its software can eliminate up to 99% of support tickets related to wide-area network and application access issues.

“With powerful ML-based capabilities, we deliver dramatic reductions in ‘day two’ operational costs. A customer recently told us they reduced their WAN costs by 82%,” said Kumar Ramachandran, the head of product management for Palo Alto Networks’ firewall-as-a-platform business line and previously chief executive of CloudGenix. 

Using AI to automate troubleshooting is an approach that other players in the wide-area networking market are adopting as well. Juniper Networks Inc. joined the fray in July. A few weeks earlier, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Aruba unit rolled out an AI-powered platform to help customers automate network operations.

Cybersecurity, Palo Alto Networks’ main specialty, was also a focus in today’s update. The company is adding integrations between CloudGenix and its Prisma Access platform for protecting enterprise networks from cyberattacks. As a result, administrators will gain the ability to configure security settings for their companies’ CloudGenix-powered infrastructure via the Prisma Access interface.

Photo: Johannes Weber/Flickr