November 2025

Ernest Lefner, CPO, Gluware gives a sponsored talk at hashtag#AutoCon4 on
“Crossing the Chasm with Gluware”

Ernest talks about how to cross the automation chasm, or the Pareto Priniciple of needing only 20% effort to get 80% value instead of vice-versa.

The chasm is how to take 80% of the effort you need to build a foundational automation capability – training, tools, development. The key is the knowledge that engineers have about the network to drive revenues and business.

When Jeff Gray and his co-founders showed their first network automation prototype to a major network equipment manufacturer over a decade ago, the response was dismissive. The vendor questioned why anyone would want a system that constantly modified network configurations, calling it something that would get “really really busy.” The prevailing wisdom held that networks should be set-it-and-forget-it, with changes avoided to prevent cascading outages.

The AWS outage that took down a sizable portion of the web in October was caused by something almost mundane: automated systems that tried to update the same DNS record simultaneously, resulting in chaos that may have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gluware has launched Gluware Titan, a validation architecture designed to bring agentic artificial intelligence (AI) into production network infrastructure with a focus on assurance, compliance, and control. The architecture aims to address concerns from Chief Information Officers (CIOs) about the trustworthiness of AI in critical enterprise networks by providing verification mechanisms for every AI-driven change.