December 18, 2018

In the enterprise ecosystem, the idea of automation has remained localized to deploying apps or services and has little to do with closed-loop healing and optimization. Disrupting the status quo, Sea Street is a company that has developed an AI autonomous operations platform, StratOS, which enables providers and enterprises to progressively transform their businesses to fully autonomous, AI-driven operations. Companies can now fully automate assurance, healing, optimization, upgrade, maintenance and compliance for services and applications of all types.

Sea Street broadens the scope of ‘intent,’ applying the concept to application and service operations in total, instead of just focusing on the network. To encapsulate service intent and inject AI, the company enables users to create digital twins of the applications and services. The twins are built from reusable, atomic models of service elements. At runtime, the models consume relevant telemetry and use their in-built intelligence to continuously manage the application or service to performance, SLA and compliance targets. “Just as an aircraft autopilot uses a model informed by current conditions to make decisions and act, our digital twins enable user- designable decisioning and action for IT operations,” says Brian Kahn, VP, Solution Architecture, Sea Street.

Key to the Sea Street’s success is their atomic approach to AI. “Our customers’ end goal is business transformation through autonomous operations,” says Kahn, “but, you have to be able to get there in a progressive, step-wise manner, and you have to bring your people along. With our atomic approach, customers build small, element-sized AI atoms and then combine them into AI molecules to automate complex services. This atomic approach means the AI design tasks are manageable, the existing teams can learn to do the work, there is very high model reuse, and the enterprise gets a predictable and profitable transformation that everyone supports.”

Another key is abstraction. “It’s important to decouple the models that define how the applications or services should operate from the specific infrastructure components with a strong abstraction layer. An automation approach that is implementation bound will be fragile, expensive and short-lived,” continues Kahn, “and you will never achieve a digital twin of the organization if you spend all your time refactoring.”

Sea Street brings a complete business transformation solution to autonomous ops: platform, design tools, methodology and training. “The platform adds the self-driving capability that transforms deployment, assurance, healing, governance, optimization, and upgrade for services and applications,” says James Kelso, VP of Business Development and Marketing at Sea Street, “but it’s the methodology, design tools and human capital transformation program that enable the same for organizations as a whole.”

For Telecom companies, Sea Street is solving a wide range of autonomous operations challenges in the video, converged communications and networking spaces. A good example is the Network as a Service (NaaS) layer they provide for a major Tier-1 Telco. Sitting north of the controllers and orchestrators for SDN, NFV, wired and wireless networks, the company normalizes the capabilities of the infrastructure suppliers and provides them to the modeling layer. Product teams can then rapidly compose multi-service offerings with robust SLAs and in-built dynamic operations and provide them to the market. Clients from other industries—banks, for instance—can simply buy an SD-WAN connection with 4G or 5G wireless backup and count on the Telco to seamlessly manage the networks for the best outcome.

Serving four top-tier communication service providers today, Sea Street can be expected to expand into the enterprise and other service provider realms.