Accedian announced new intent-based assurance capabilities built into the Skylight platform.

This innovation represents the next level of automated assurance, making Skylight the first platform to offer these capabilities on the market. Intent-based assurance provides the foundational visibility needed to drive intent-based networking and enable critical insights into network performance.

With Skylight intent-based assurance, communications service providers (CSPs) gain advantages, including:

- Direct visibility into service quality and user experience without the operational complexity of having to provision the behind-the-scenes details of assurance/testing.

- Increased intelligence in assurance - Skylight's intent-based assurance capability understands how the service should behave. It can understand when the service is having an issue - or may potentially have an issue in the future (predictive) - and immediately trigger the controller layer for closed-loop optimization or remediation.

- Accelerated time to market for new services - Intent-based assurance understands how to instrument the network to assure a service without manual intervention. Adding assurance to the network is easier to automate and deploy efficiently, helping to speed up time to market for new, performance-assured services.

- Cost savings - Proactively address issues and rapidly determine the root cause of performance degradations, reducing the operational cost of running increasingly complex networks.

Dion Joannou, CEO, Accedian, said: "Network complexity has accelerated beyond the manageability of manual intervention. Automation is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. It's a journey that takes open integration, standardization, and simplification work to get there. Intent-based assurance understands how the service should behave, and it can understand when the service is having an issue and inform the orchestration layer. This added intelligence will provide customers with the continuous visibility and feedback loop on service quality that they need."

Roy Chua, Founder and Principal Analyst, AvidThink, said: "The exploding number of network elements and connections that require management and maintenance show no sign of abating. Because of this, network managers and operators urgently need to improve manageability and increase scalability even as they try to rein in expenditures. Intent-based assurance adds value to today's networks immediately."