Hi, This is not a vendor bashing thread. We are a group of networking engineers less experience with software) in the middle of the process of procuring a network automation/orchestration controller, if that is even a good definition and we are clueless on how to evaluate them. Other than the obvious, which is to try them out, i wonder what else is important to consider/watch out for. We are presented with 3 different vendors and even OpenDayLight was considered as the open source alternative. My humble thoughts are given below and i would appreciate getting 'schooled' on what i need to ask the vendors: 1) Are they Model driven : But i still don't know how to evaluate that. 2) Do they parse Cisco/Juniper CLI or they are limited to SNMP and YANG. 3) If they do parse, we want to check if they'll hold us by the balls if the current parsers need to be updated, i.e: can we change the code ourselves and add new features to be parsed. 4) Can they work/orchestrate between CLI devices and Non CLI devices (SNMP) 5) How flexible are they to support different Vendors (Cisco, Juniper, some-weird-firewall...etc) thanks, Kim