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How Corning Is Driving Global Network Transformation with Itential

Kristen H. Rachels

Chief Marketing Officer

When Corning began planning its global device refresh, the numbers alone were daunting. Thousands of devices across dozens of countries. Multiple vendors. A hard deadline stretching to 2030. And all of it had to be achieved without adding staff.

Most enterprises would see those numbers and hesitate. For Corning, hesitation wasn’t an option. The network is the foundation of its business – powering research labs, manufacturing plants, and offices worldwide. The challenge wasn’t whether to modernize, but how.

A Problem Too Big for Manual Effort

Inconsistent scripts. Fragmented tools. Compliance checks scattered across spreadsheets and ticketing systems. The risks were clear: configuration drift, outages, audit failures. Even a single mistake could slow down critical projects or expose the company to compliance penalties.

Corning’s network team knew that manual change management could never keep up with the scale of this transformation. They needed a way to orchestrate thousands of changes across a complex, global environment – with speed and precision.

The Turning Point

That’s where Itential came in. By introducing automation and orchestration into Corning’s network operations, the team could:

Stitch together all their existing systems – ITSM, IPAM, monitoring – into one consistent workflow.
Automate not just the change itself, but the approvals, the compliance checks, and the validations that followed.
Build a system flexible enough for both low-code and high-code automation, so engineers could innovate quickly without losing control.

What had once looked impossible began to feel achievable.

Scaling Without Scaling Staff

The breakthrough wasn’t just technical – it was organizational. Suddenly, Corning could move faster without asking for more headcount. They could refresh devices worldwide, confident that every step was logged, validated, and compliant.

Chris Healy summed it up best:

Itential has given us the ability to take a consistent, scalable approach to network automation across our global environment. By integrating with our existing tools and simplifying the way we manage change, we’re able to execute on a large-scale refresh initiative while staying within our current staffing model.

Chris Healy

Director of LAN/WAN – Campus, Corning

Why This Story Matters

Corning’s journey reflects the reality facing every global enterprise: the scale of network modernization is too large, the risks too high, and the timelines too short for manual effort to succeed. Automation and orchestration aren’t “nice to haves” anymore = they’re the only way forward.

And Corning is proving what’s possible.

See the full Corning case study here.

Interested in learning how Itential can help your team automate network change at scale while reducing risk and improving compliance? Let’s talk.

Kristen H. Rachels

With over two decades of experience driving growth for B2B enterprise technology companies, Kristen leads Itential’s marketing efforts to accelerate the adoption and expansion of its innovative products and services. Before joining Itential, Kristen held marketing leadership roles at PowWow Mobile and StarMobile, where she helped establish both companies as leaders in enterprise application development. She also founded a consulting business, serving as a fractional CMO for early-stage startups. Kristen is passionate about scaling businesses, building high-performing teams, and leveraging data-driven insights to drive demand generation and pipeline growth. She is also an advocate for diversity in technology and innovation.

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