Hype Cycle season is here! This is the time of year when Gartner brings excitement to the summer doldrums and gives us an opportunity to understand where the market is headed. The release of Gartner’s highly anticipated Hype Cycle series of reports are vital for I&O leaders to understand key technology developments and where to invest in the years ahead.
This year, Itential was named in six different Gartner Hype Cycle reports, an indicator not only of our innovation and leadership, but of the depth and breadth our automation and orchestration product portfolio provides network and infrastructure teams.
Interpreting the Gartner Hype
The Gartner Hype Cycles are an annual series of reports, providing a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are relevant to solving real business problems while also exploiting new opportunities. The Hype Cycles illustrate what are considered the most relevant innovations for technology leaders to adopt and put in place and rated both ‘Infrastructure Orchestration’ and ‘Network Automation’ as providing a high level of benefit, with ‘NetDevOps’ providing transformational benefits.
- Infrastructure Orchestration: “Infrastructure orchestration is more than just infrastructure automation. It allows for the design, delivery, and operation of services across on-premises, cloud, and edge deployments.”
- NetDevOps: “NetDevOps entails applying DevOps and/or continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices to networking activities. This requires an automated pipeline that includes staging, pre/post validation, and testing of networking activities such as provisioning.”
- Network Automation: “Network automation tools help to automate provisioning/configuration, troubleshooting, operations/maintenance, validation, and reporting of network components.”
Gartner Recognizes Itential in Six Hype Cycles Across Three Categories
After showing up in two Gartner Hype Cycles in each of the last few years, Itential was recognized in six different Hype Cycles this year. Gartner tracked us across three different categories in these Hype Cycles, demonstrating the depth and breadth of our automation and orchestration capabilities, gaining us recognition in the following six areas of innovation:
Hype Cycle for I&O Automation
Category: Infrastructure Orchestration, NetDevOps, Network Automation
According to Gartner’s report, investments in I&O automation are increasing due to “the need to enable improved speed to market, increased business agility, mitigation of security and compliance risk, optimization of performance, and minimization of service costs.” Itential was recognized as a key vendor for three specific innovation areas: Infrastructure Orchestration, NetDevOps, and Network Automation, all recognized as areas of high or transformational benefit as infrastructure becomes more programmable and hybrid environments become the norm.
Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking
Category: NetDevOps
The most significant driver for enterprise networking investment is digital transformation, with network modernization a key component to increasing automation and keeping networks secure even as they transform to suit a modern environment. This report recognizes Itential for our capabilities that enable NetDevOps, a strategic approach to automation technology that’s identified as a ‘transformational’ benefit to organizations who successfully implement it.
Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies
Category: Infrastructure Orchestration
Gartner identifies the critical priority technology leaders face is to “devise sustainable, secure, scalable, agile, intelligent, and resilient physical infrastructure at an acceptable cost.” Data center infrastructure technologies that can enhance business technology platforms are key areas of innovation here. Itential is named a sample vendor for Infrastructure Orchestration, a key component of data center transformation.
Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering
Category: Infrastructure Orchestration
“SRE practices,” says the SRE Hype Cycle report, “enable organizations to drive agile software delivery while optimizing reliability, performance, and cost.” Again recognized for Infrastructure Orchestration, Itential delivers key capabilities for unifying management and automation of infrastructure elements, enabling users to adopt SRE practices with full flexibility even as their environments continue to expand and change.
Hype Cycle for Operating Models
Category: Infrastructure Orchestration, NetDevOps
The Hype Cycle for Operating Models is a strong resource for technology leaders, outlining the “combination of organizational structures, processes, capabilities, and relationships” that enable an organization to achieve its strategic objectives. Gartner recognizes Itential for both our support of a NetDevOps approach to network automation as well as our capabilities to support end-to-end orchestration across all your infrastructure, key for companies looking to modernize the way they leverage network and infrastructure technologies to serve business goals.
Hype Cycle for Compute
Category: Infrastructure Orchestration
According to Gartner, a “resurgence in hardware innovation” driven by the need for new technologies to support generative AI, quantum computing, and other innovations, has led to organizations placing an increased priority on unifying automation and orchestration across every element of infrastructure. Itential is named as a key Infrastructure Orchestration vendor in this report. When it comes to Compute specifically, Gartner outlines the fact that orchestration solutions like Itential enable technologies like function accelerator cards, which AI clusters rely on, to “offload networking and storage capabilities from CPUs and security functions so they can be enforced at the server level.”
Automation is the Engine that Accelerates Delivery of Value for I&O Leaders
Our inclusion in six of Gartner’s Hype Cycle reports is a clear sign that the market is maturing and recognizing that automation and orchestration via DevOps principles are important, not just in networking but in the larger infrastructure market. According to the Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, 2023, “By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2021.” Gartner states that “automation is a transformational investment for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders. Investments in this area reflect the need to enable improved speed to market, increased business agility, mitigation of security and compliance risk, optimization of performance, and minimization of service costs.”
In today’s world of continuous delivery and frequent deployments, automation and orchestration have become imperative to modern enterprises. Therefore, organizations must adopt solutions that simplify and accelerate automation at scale, reduce operational risk, and critically enable the transformation of network and infrastructure activities into self-serve, application-driven outcomes that end users can request like cloud services.
How Itential is Unique
It’s clear that today’s enterprise IT departments are quickly adopting a multitude of technologies to meet their critical business demands, which has led to an explosion of deployments across multiple cloud platforms, cloud-based services, and traditional on-prem solutions.
Itential provides IT departments with a single platform that can simplify and automate the delivery of infrastructure services to application developers – how, when, and where they need them – and update the infrastructure in real-time to ensure that it aligns with security and business needs. The Itential Automation Platform is based on a fundamentally unique approach to infrastructure orchestration, designed to enable IT, applications, and network teams to simplify and accelerate the end-to-end automation of infrastructure deployment, provisioning, and management.
If you aren’t yet looking at solutions like this, check out Itential’s capabilities for Network Automation, Infrastructure as Code (NetDevOps) and Infrastructure Orchestration and see what our customers are saying about us. Also, you can access a complimentary copy of the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation here.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
