Enabling Agentic AI and Securing the Data Perimeter with Opengear SMF and UDOP

At Tech Field Day during Cisco Live San Diego, Opengear CTO Douglas Wadkins introduced the Unified Digital Operations Platform (UDOP), a new category of intelligent infrastructure built for AI driven network operations. UDOP builds on Opengear’s Smart Out of Band technologies to deliver a centralized, secure, and intelligent foundation for enterprise grade AIOps.

Opengear, has over 20 years of experience in IT and network management solutions. They are leveraging their established platform to develop a Unified Digital Operations Platform (UDOP) for AI driven network operations. This initiative stems from a recent push into the rapidly evolving AI landscape, which revealed both immense potential and significant societal implications, particularly concerning the future of junior roles in the workforce due to increased AI driven efficiency. The core challenge in developing effective AI agents is providing them with rich, contextual data, which is often fragmented across various siloed business systems.

Opengear’s UDOP aims to break down these data silos by building upon their existing platform’s ability to connect to virtually any sensor or management port, pulling in diverse contextual data and enabling control. This is critical because, as the presentation highlights, siloed data leads to siloed, less intelligent AI agents. The discussion also touched upon the industry shift away from traditional Software as a Service (SaaS) applications towards agent centric models, as evidenced by statements from CEOs of major tech companies like Microsoft and Salesforce. This transition emphasizes the need for new platforms that can secure proprietary domain knowledge when exposed to AI agents.

The presentation then discusses the evolution of AI agents, from simple first generation query response systems to more sophisticated second generation agents that incorporate external data and tools, and finally to the anticipated third generation agents that will operate with a higher degree of autonomy. Opengear’s UDOP is designed to support these advanced agents by providing a secure and governed framework for data ingestion, access control, and a feedback loop, potentially incorporating simulation and digital twins for training. The platform addresses emerging industry protocols like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for normalizing disparate data and Google’s agent-to-agent protocol for inter-agent communication, while also emphasizing the critical need for robust security and identity management within these new AI driven ecosystems.