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The lab is an engineer’s creative space to invent new concepts and test them for market readiness.
Because rapid innovation and prototyping are now a central part of the success equation for technology businesses, lab engineers must be equipped with all the advantages lab automation delivers. It’s about moving fast. Innovating at the speed of demand. Having the luxury of focusing on what’s critical, not just what needs to get done. In short, it’s what success looks like in hyper-competitive markets.
The Case for Continuous Exploration
For example, effective DevOps and NetOps funnels are sought to continuously introduce, enhance and update digital products and services. But continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD) and release on demand (RoD) begin with continuous exploration (CE). According to the scaled agile framework (SAFe), CE is the starting point where market needs are assessed, business alignment is defined, and prototypes and MVPs are developed and tested. This is how modern technology innovation happens and it starts in an automated lab.
The more efficient, collaborative and visible the lab is, the faster and more effective the innovation-driving CE process will be. An automated lab is the foundation for sustaining healthy flow of product innovation and enhancement. What happens in the lab contributes directly to the entire organization’s competitiveness in the marketplace. Because the continuous delivery process is based on automation and collaboration, it makes an automated and collaborative lab environment a requirement.
In as little as ten days, lab environments can be equipped with new, leading edge capabilities that power DevOps and NetOps collaboration and initiate a path to full automation, federation and consolidation.
How to Automate the Lab Rapidly
Operators can kick off lab automation and collaboration rapidly with a lab-as-a-service (LaaS) solution. In as little as ten days, lab environments can be equipped with new, leading edge capabilities that power DevOps and NetOps collaboration and initiate a path to full automation, federation and consolidation. Key capabilities for an automated lab include:
A single pane of glass console for designing testbeds, standing up and sharing sandboxes, and facilitating global collaboration across teams.
Auto-discovery to capture lab environments’ network states and make them accessible in the shared design console to engineers everywhere around the clock.
Work order automation that translates designs into instructions for lab techs that focus on only the changes and added resources needed to implement designs for testing. This eliminates the slow process of comparing drawings to the lab setup to decipher provisioning steps.
Once any-to-any connectivity is established, zero-touch provisioning can flow from the design console to the lab network, delivering full lab automation. This can also enable federated labs where resources located in different regions are discovered and made accessible.
Lab automation’s benefits are massive. Filling development funnels via a fully automated lab environment makes rapid collaborative innovation a competitive differentiator. Spirent customers that have automated labs with Spirent’s Velocity LaaS platform have accelerated testbed setups by 300x, cutting the process from 50 hours to ten minutes. Substantial reductions in CAPEX are inherent as lab resource utilization is optimized and productivity maximized. The collaborative, automated lab is a gamechanger in a world where a company’s ability to master digital innovation is a determining factor for competitiveness and success.
To learn more enabling rapid innovation through lab automation, please contact us today and visit our Velocity LaaS information page. You can also download the Velocity LaaS datasheet here.
