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Zayo appointed telecom veteran Nikos Katinakis as its new chief technology officer
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Katinakis is ushering in a focus on artificial intelligence and automation, which he said will bring more efficiency and resiliency to the Zayo network
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He is also on a mission to automate the Zayo network's APIs
There's a new CTO in town at Zayo, and he's bringing an artificial intelligence (AI) agenda to the table.
Founded in 2007, Colorado-based Zayo's over 142,500-mile network in North America and Europe includes metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers. This week, newly appointed Nikos Katinakis sat down with Fierce Telecom to talk about joining the fiber company.
Katinakis’ first order of business as Zayo’s CTO? To increase network resiliency and efficiency as much as possible.
As an engineer with tenures at Ericsson, Telstra and Rogers, Katinakis has seen networks being held to an increasingly high standard. “There's just an expectation that not only the consumer markets, but the business markets also, are up and running all the time,” he said.
Because Zayo is the product of many acquisitions over the years, the company needs to optimize the different components that make up its network to meet growing customer expectations. That’s where AI and automation come in.
For example, AI can be leveraged for network analytics and predictions, noted Katinakis, as it can analyze minor alarms traditionally filtered out by OSS systems, detecting patterns to predict what’s going to happen in the future and enabling proactive maintenance.
It can do the same for capacity augmentation. Right now, capacity is a manual process where network operators measure growth and consumption, and then “roll the dice” in guessing how their network is going to grow. But now, AI engines can read certain data, like where the energy grid is strong or where data centers are being built, and predict where more capacity will be needed.
Additionally, AI and automation can bring restoration capabilities through analysis of past incidents, accelerating root cause identification and troubleshooting to minimize downtime.
Zayo has its toes dipped into cyber security waters as well, with a portfolio of edge solutions that includes SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities announced in 2022. Reports from Zayo, based on data collected from its own customers, have found the telecom industry is often hit hard in a growing threat landscape.
Zayo’s network is considered critical infrastructure, so "from a national interest perspective,” it can't afford too many vulnerabilities, Katinakis said. The use of AI and automation, he added, has also become “quite embedded in cybersecurity, as you can imagine.”
In terms of the actual AI tech (and potential partners) Zayo will work with, Katinakis said the company has not made the selection at this point. "AI models become old, develop biases, etc so we are going into this knowing that these models will keep changing," he added.
API automation
Another focus for Katinakis coming into Zayo is making its network infrastructure easy to turn up and manage. That's not so much of an AI discussion, but centered around another big A acronym in telecom — API, or Application Programming Interface.
An API is a set of rules, protocols and tools that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Essentially, it defines how software components should interact, making it easier for developers to integrate various functionalities into their applications without having to write all the code from scratch.
On the Zayo front, Katinakis said there's “a lot of opportunity” to bring more automation to the APIs operating its network.
Right now, if Zayo gets a request to build a new fiber connection it could take months. But with AI predicting where customers will likely ask for connectivity, and more automation on its APIs, time to activate service could be brought to hours, or even minutes.
Automated interfaces mean customers should be able to ask for a connection from point A to point B, with specifications on the speed they want (“400 gig or 1 gig, or whatever," Katinakis continued), and Zayo should be able to create the order with the press of a button.
Katinakis concluded, “It's just making transactions like that a lot easier, compared to today, which is pretty manual."