Forward Networks has evolved into simply Forward, and unveiled Forward Predict, said to be a first-of-its-kind capability that shows the full impact of network changes before they are made.
With the primary aim of making safe autonomous networking possible, Forward’s network digital twin is designed to deliver deterministic proof of how any change will affect a production network before it is made.
This, said Forward, will give organisations the behavioural insight they need to move fast, operate securely, and scale with confidence across multi-supplier environments and every major cloud, such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM.
Forward customers include Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM and Dell, alongside other Fortune 500 enterprises and government agencies.
By running every proposed change against a mathematically accurate digital twin of the entire production network, Forward Predict is attributed with ensuring that costly errors never reach production, giving organisations the confidence to move faster, operate safely at any scale, and lay the foundation for autonomous networking.
“We built Forward on the conviction that math could do what manual processes never could,” said Forward chief artificial intelligence (AI) officer and co-founder Nikhil Handigol. “Network changes have always carried unnecessary risk, because engineers lacked definitive knowledge of the network behaviour.
“Forward Predict changes the paradigm by verifying every change before it happens, which means engineering teams stop operating on instinct and start operating on certainty. This level of certainty is the essential prerequisite for autonomous networking, enabling AI agents to propose, verify and deploy at machine speed without human intervention.”
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, said: “Autonomous networking has long been the goal, but the missing piece has always been trust. Forward Predict changes that by providing a mathematically accurate environment where IT leaders can validate both human and AI-driven changes before they touch production. This creates the safety net required to finally move at machine speed without the fear of manual errors or outages.”
Looking at the key technology in the service, Forward’s digital twin model is said to contain the state of every device from every supplier, from the network layer to the application layer. This model is claimed to be able to understand all possible ways the network can handle packets, identify where policies are in conflict and answer questions with what is said to be “mathematical certainty”.
Such capabilities also extend to future states of the network. Proposed changes are validated against a production equivalent network digital twin spanning every supplier and every cloud. The intention is that risks are discovered and resolved before anything touches the live network. The platform verifies the impact of a change through testing and delivers deterministic evidence of the outcome.
In its beta deployments with select, unnamed customers, Forward said Predict is already delivering results in the ability to accelerate design to deployment; validate changes before they reach production; and eliminate risk at design time.
“Once you see the platform and you understand how it works, trusting it is easy,” said Steve Bamford, senior network engineer at IG Group. “I have deliberately tested scenarios that, if pushed live, would have isolated parts of the network and taken the network down. Predict catches them. Being able to test changes across our entire production network before they go live is a game-changer, and it accelerates our autonomous networking journey.”
