Pipeline Publishing: Looking Through the Prism: Intelligent Automation for Modern Networks

Networks are feeling the full force of AI-driven demand. Hyperscale data centers, cloud providers, and service operators are pushing fiber deployments harder than ever to feed low-latency generative models, agentic systems, and edge workloads that consume bandwidth at unprecedented scale. At the same time, the underlying infrastructure remains stubbornly complex—multi-vendor equipment spanning decades of technology generations, siloed management systems, tens of thousands of devices, and petabits of capacity that are often poorly understood or underutilized.

Operators face constant pressure to contain costs, maintain five-nines or six-nines reliability, navigate supply chain constraints, and move toward autonomous network operations without massive rip-and-replace projects. The gap between raw network data and actionable intelligence has become one of the most expensive problems in the industry, demanding advanced optical network observability and AI-driven network automation.

Simplifying Network Complexity

Pipeline recently had an opportunity to sit down with stakeholders at LightRiver, including Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Operations Walt Paskowski, Senior Vice President of Software Solutions, Jim Brinksma, and Vice President of Software Product Management, Marcelo McAndrew, to explore how the company’s Prism® platform helps address the gap by translating network complexity into clean, operational intelligence to prepare organizations for the shift to autonomous networking.