Microland Digital Warriors

Microland Digital Warriors | 57 © MICROLAND LIMITED 2020. Internal Circulation Only 56 #DontThrowAwayOldLaptops COVID-19 brought especially depressing news for Shrikant. With the lockdowns, his test lab in office became inaccessible. Shrikant was working on Operational Excellence by automating the day-to-day operations that network engineers do—modifying firewalls, configuring routers and switches—and had a few use cases to test. With no test lab, he watched TV, got bored and quickly turned his attention back to work. He dug out an old high-end laptop and developed a virtual lab from scratch. He was back in business! He also got more than a 100 use cases to automate and test. But we have got ahead of the story. As a solutions architect with triple CCIE, Shrikant conceptualized network services as pre- built consumables. His script automated the processes of gathering and understanding information from a tech estate and storing it in Network Assurance Platform (NAP). Without this, engineers would spend around 30-60 minutes per device (and go through around 500 - 2,000 devices depending on the estate). Now the same thing is a click of a button. He also created templates that define standards and best practices for the design phase that L3-L4 engineers (Architects) can use to reduce effort by 50%. Finally, he created configuration templates to eliminate human error before the configurations are pushed into SD-WAN. He also worked on developing key digital use cases on Wi-Fi for various Industry verticals. Now, Shrikant is working on the Operations Excellence piece and somewhere in between he skilled himself in NetOps and learnt Ansible. As a solution architect, the whiteboard is his best friend, but he likes to get his hands dirty and thinks the only way to do this confidently is to upskill. This is one reason he relates to –and admires—Microland’s philosophy of investing in talent and infrastructure. “It is evident that Microland is on the right path to building and strengthening its digital capabilities,” says Shrikant. But watch out for what Shrikant is doing in his free time. He is reading up on 5G, with special interest in developments around unlicensed 5G spectrum. “It will change the managed services business,” predicts Shrikant. “I want Microland to be the first to provide new capabilities to customers for unlicensed 5G.” Shrikant Dandin This Digital warrior was involved in critical service innovation conceptualizing the network services as pre-built consumable capability chunks thus accelerating the rapid adoption of services. This innovative concept is a fundamental building block of Microland’s Network Assurance Platform.”