Last week, our team had the opportunity to join the Networking Field Day community for a live presentation and demo series, where we showcased how Itential is driving productization of infrastructure services through the fusion of automation and orchestration to deliver meaningful outcomes for organizations. Our focus was on moving beyond traditional, isolated automation (aka “siloed” automation) and demonstrating a holistic approach that enables teams to create scalable infrastructure services that add significant value to the business.
To kick off our event, I took the audience through the evolution of network automation — a journey I’ve been part of for nearly three decades. From the early days in the 90s, when automation meant patching together scripts and wrestling with clunky element management systems, to the robust tools we have today, it’s been remarkable to see how far we’ve come.
Those early efforts were mostly about simplifying repetitive tasks, and they came with limitations. Over the last decade, tools like Ansible and networking-specific libraries such as NetMiko and NAPALM have transformed automation from experimental and limited to reliable and routine, laying the foundation for the innovation and momentum we’re seeing now.
But here’s where things get exciting: I believe network automation is finally poised to move beyond cost savings and start delivering real value for the organization. It’s not just about making operations faster; it’s about creating a product mindset, where automation, orchestration, and productization come together to produce services that benefit the whole business. That’s our focus at Itential. With our cloud-based automation and orchestration stack, we’re helping customers build scalable, integrated solutions that align with their organization’s goals. This shift from consumer to producer in network automation is transforming the way we think about our infrastructure — and it’s a thrilling time to be part of this change.
At NFD 36, we showcased our full suite of services enabling automation, orchestration, and productization.
Our team dives deeper into each layer of our approach in each of the following on-demand sessions. Wyatt takes you through the network engineer’s journey, demonstrating how our new automation capabilities operationalize infrastructure automation through a standardized execution layer, delivering automations as services. Rich then steps in to explore how orchestration architects bridge isolated automation domains, enabling cohesive, organization-wide workflows. Finally, Dan, acting as a product manager, brings it all together by showing how a product mindset allows for the creation of services, like our secure access cross-connect example, that can be consumed by developers and other departments, truly operationalizing automation across the enterprise. You can catch the full session on-demand here to get a firsthand look at how Itential is transforming network automation into a powerful business enabler.
The Full NFD 36 Playlist
The Evolution of Network Automation
Transitioning from Consumer to Producer
Operationalize Your Network Automations
Standardize, Execute, & Securely Share Infrastructure Automations
Orchestrate Your Network Automations
Building Workflows to Integrate with Your IT Ecosystem
Productize Your Network Automations
Using Stateful Data to Deliver Infrastructure Services
After you catch the the on-demand sessions, go take a free test drive of our new automation offering and let us know what you think!
Peter Sprygada
Vice President, Product Management ‐ Itential
Peter Sprygada serves as the Vice President, Product Management at Itential after serving as the Chief Technology Officer at Pureport where he was responsible for their multi-cloud network as a service interconnect platform. Prior to Pureport, Sprygada was a Distinguished Engineer for Red Hat, where he played the role of Chief Architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Sprygada also held senior technical and leadership positions at Arista and Cisco, as well as several networking startups.
