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HPE's networking boss says AI will handle all trouble tickets without humans in two years
HPE is extending its AI-powered networking automation across its hybrid cloud portfolio.
4 min read
Key points
- The networking boss thinks AIOps will mean human network administrators soon won't need to work on any trouble tickets.
- "I think we're now at probably around 70 to 80 percent of all tickets don't require human intervention," Rahim said.
- "Within two to three years, we'll have no issues that require humans." He allows that hardware swaps will be the exception to that rule, but even for that job he thinks skilled network administrators shouldn't be involved.
The story
HPE is extending its AI-powered networking automation across its hybrid cloud portfolio. That news came from Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper Networks and now president and general manager of HPE's networking business, whom The Register met last week when he visited Australia. Rahim champions what HPE calls "self-driving networks" – AI-assisted monitoring and automated remediation, part of the broader field known as AIOps. The networking boss thinks AIOps will mean human network administrators soon won't need to work on any trouble tickets. "I think we're now at probably around 70 to 80 percent of all tickets don't require human intervention," Rahim said. "Within two to three years, we'll have no issues that require humans." He allows that hardware swaps will be the exception to that rule, but even for that job he thinks skilled network administrators shouldn't be involved. "The technology should, without your knowledge, order a new part. It comes in the mail and you don't need an IT person, just an intern can come and take this thing, attach it to where the failed device is, and everything else just happens automatically." Why you'll trust your career to a machine The Register asked why net admins should trust AIOps, given that following bad advice issued by a machine is unlikely to improve anyone's career prospects. Rahim responded by pointing out that self-driving taxis have quickly become widely accepted in the Bay Area, and that first-time riders draw on their past experience of adopting cars with automatic transmissions, then cars with cruise control, lane assist, and self-driving capabilities. Each successive experience of automation working safely, he suggested, imparts confidence to try new forms of automation. "And so what we do is we give the operators the ability to turn on actions, automated actions, feature by feature, and capability by capability," he said. Simple jobs like allowing AI to reboot a port on a switch is a fine place to start, he suggested. The metrics he uses to measure the success of automation are the number of tickets lodged about poor Wi-Fi performance and the speed with which they are fixed. "I think if you look at the number one trouble ticket that is filed in a typical enterprise environment, it is 'the Wi-Fi sucks.'" "Regardless of what the actual problem is – it could be an application going down, or a WAN issue, or a cloud provider issue – the experience is first felt through Wi-Fi and therefore it's as simple as 'The Wi-Fi sucks.'" Rahim thinks AI will figure out why Wi-Fi isn't at its best quicker than a human can do the job and also use agents to fix it faster. Those agents, he suggested, make automation even more important because they represent a new class of users that are dependent on networks. "We're quickly approaching a realm in which every enterprise has way more agents working than humans working, and they need a reliable network connection to do their work," he said. Organizations can't scale their human teams to a size at which they solve problems fast enough to manage all those connections. And because agents make so much traffic, buyers will need to add more networking hardware, which will further scale networks to a size no human can hope to manage alone. Only AI, Rahim believes, will make it possible to use AI. A 'networking company'? Of course he would say that, given that he claims HPE's networking portfolio and AI capabilities are second to none since it closed the acquisition of Juniper in July 2025. The Register covered that moment with the headline "HPE-Juniper deal closes, integration questions remain." Rahim assured us it's going swimmingly, pointing to the fact that HPE continues to sell Wi-Fi access points that started life as products from Aruba and Juniper – but that users can now drive them with management tools from either vendor. He proudly pointed to that becoming possible within 18 months of the acquisition closing, then made a sharp reference to certain other vendors taking far longer to achieve the same thing. The Register mentioned Cisco and Meraki: Rahim didn't show any signs of disagreement. Asked about HPE CEO Antonio Neri's statement on the company's last earnings call that "we are at the core becoming a networking company," Rahim emphasized networking's importance across workloads. "When you look at the AI datacenter, it's become as much a networking problem as it is a compute problem. So I just believe that networking is becoming more important in general for the industry, and it's certainly becoming more important for HPE as a company," he said. Which is why HPE is now bringing the self-driving network tech that started life at Juniper to the rest of its portfolio. "We've already, for example, integrated our network fabric management capabilities with OpsRamp, which is the observability software for the hybrid cloud stack," Rahim said. "So that would be an example of something that's now done. But more and more pieces will come along the way." ®
