Gartner® Hype Cycle for I&O Automation Highlights Shift Towards “Automation-First” & Need for Broader Orchestration
For the second year running, Itential was named a representative vendor in six different Gartner® Hype Cycle reports, highlighting our platform’s wide range of capabilities and its applicability across different areas of IT and network infrastructure. We’re thrilled to be recognized in these 2024 Gartner Hype Cycle reports across I&O Automation, Enterprise Networking, Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, Site Reliability Engineering, Operation Models, and Compute.
The Gartner Hype Cycles are an annual series of reports that provide data and insights to track the maturity and adoption of different technology trends. In this year’s Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, Itential was named as a sample vendor for NetDevOps, Infrastructure Orchestration, and Network Automation, which are all classed as high-benefit technologies — showing just how important automation and a modern approach to infrastructure are to enabling innovation.
Let’s dive into the insights from the I&O report, focused on the business value of automation and how infrastructure leaders can better understand how to apply these technologies to manage and scale their operations.
I&O Automation Hype: Efficiency, Innovation, & Optimization
According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for I&O Automation report, “automation and orchestration remain foundational to delivering reliability, efficiency and productivity.” The report further states that “automation is the engine that accelerates delivery of business value and infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must view automation as a core capability that optimizes their capacity to deliver high-velocity, high-efficiency and high-performance services to their stakeholders.”
The growing integration of Generative AI, cloud services, DevOps, and platform engineering — representing a shift towards an “automation-first” approach — is driving a need for broader infrastructure orchestration so I&O teams can deliver services that meet user needs.
Modern infrastructure services are more complex, requiring a modern operational paradigm where infrastructure teams transition from automating tasks to orchestrating complex workflows. I&O leaders must adopt solutions that enable the creation of standardized, repeatable, scalable processes to accelerate and optimize infrastructure delivery, mitigate risk, and enable autonomy.
The report outlines four major factors behind the rise of automation in infrastructure and operations:
The Needs of Modern Business
Automation and orchestration are required to accelerate delivery of business capabilities. Modern business relies on modern infrastructure such as hybrid cloud, SD-WAN and edge, and evolving data center infrastructure. To deliver services to a global workforce across this complex infrastructure, organizations must invest in automation and orchestration technology.
Evolving Infrastructure Landscape
Hybrid infrastructure, cloud migration, and digital transformation efforts require new delivery and operations strategies. How can an IT organization efficiently deliver a service to a developer which requires a change in a data center, a public cloud environment, two security tools, and a change management solution? It’s critical for teams to adopt solutions that can connect distributed infrastructure and enable centralized automation and orchestration.
Application Development
Organizations must empower developers with self-serve infrastructure and platform engineering approaches. When a developer orders a service from AWS, they receive it instantly. No time is lost, no context switching impacts productivity. Delivering the same cloud-like experience for internal infrastructure is a top priority.
Automation Skill Development
Reliability and performance are more important in infrastructure and operations than ever. Human error is the cause of many incidents, and short change windows and high manual workloads increase the frequency of errors. When automation is accessible and easy to use, teams can turn expertise into repeatable processes and deliver services more quickly while reducing errors at the same time.
The report forecasts that 30% of enterprises “will automate more than half of their network activities” in 2026, up from under 10% in mid-2023. And those organizations are expected to leapfrog any competition that’s slower to transform. Gartner projects that, by 2027, I&O leaders who have focused on enterprise-wide automation delivery will double the value delivered by their service quality and cost optimization efforts.
To expand automation to enterprise scale, organizations must also invest more heavily in orchestration. As the report states, “combining automation technologies to enable orchestrated delivery patterns continues to improve I&O automation’s value to consumers.” It’s one thing to automate a specific task or activity within one IT domain. Coordinating multi-step change processes across complex, hybrid infrastructure adds significant value to automation and enables automation to drive value for the entire business.
As automation and orchestration continue to rise in importance for I&O organizations, it’s becoming crucial for organizations to find the right solutions. Itential’s unique capabilities put us in the perfect position to help I&O organizations transform and accelerate to enable innovation.
How Itential’s Automation & Orchestration Capabilities Enable I&O Innovation
At Itential, we’re focused on providing the best possible products for I&O automation and orchestration, with the ability to integrate with any vendor technology and orchestrate workflows across all network and IT domains.
It’s clear from the Hype Cycle report that today, enterprise network and infrastructure teams are using more tools and operating across a more distributed, complex landscape than ever before. Itential’s automation, orchestration, and integration capabilities enable teams to get more out of their infrastructure and build automation and orchestration more efficiently. It’s the only platform that’s purpose-built for NetDevOps teams to treat the network and infrastructure as code and turn the network into a driver of innovation.
Across six Gartner Hype Cycles, we were listed as sample vendors for three high-impact technologies:
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Network Automation
Hype Cycle Status: Climbing the Slope
Benefit Rating: High
Network automation, including both code built by hand and vendor-provided controllers, is key to increasing a network engineering team’s capacity to fulfill service requests and increase the efficiency of the business overall.
Itential provides a way to centralize and standardize automation execution with Itential Automation Gateway, which allows engineers to turn automations into services and enables people without coding expertise to run automations safely and securely.
Infrastructure Orchestration
Hype Cycle Status: At the Peak
Benefit Rating: High
Coordinating automation across multiple infrastructure tools and systems turns complex processes into end-to-end outcomes. Enabling platform and I&O teams to design, deliver, operate, and assure orchestrated services across hybrid infrastructure will improve standardization and efficiency, which will improve consumer experience for end users of network and infrastructure services.
Itential provides IT departments with a single platform that can simplify and orchestrate 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.
NetDevOps
Hype Cycle Status: On the Rise
Benefit Rating: High
NetDevOps practices bring together network engineering expertise with software development strategies to accelerate and streamline network engineering. Network tams who implement NetDevOps are leveraging low-code orchestration, automated testing, and more to standardize and accelerate the delivery of network engineering to the business.
Itential is purpose-built for NetDevOps teams. It provides the low-code workflow capabilities teams need while providing Git support and a centralized platform that allows network teams to adopt DevOps practices around building, sharing, testing, and delivering network automation assets.
By leveraging Itential’s unique capabilities to integrate with everything in a hybrid infrastructure environment and orchestrate any change process as an end-to-end workflow, I&O leaders can deliver transformative benefits to the business overall. Our platform enables network and infrastructure teams to commit to the practices, strategies, and technologies that tomorrow’s most successful I&O organizations will rely on.
Learn more about Itential’s platform here, or sign your team up for one of our Workshops for a guided, hands-on test drive!
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