The Gartner 2025 Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms is clear: Automation is now a business requirement, but most enterprises are still stuck in silos.
Download the report to understand what’s changed, what’s holding teams back, and why a unified platform approach is the key to scale.
This year’s guide reinforces what infrastructure and operations leaders already feel: Automation can’t be limited to config management or a handful of scripts. It must drive operational outcomes across all domains—network, cloud, security, and service operations. But most enterprises are stuck with fragmented tooling and lack the resources to unify it all. Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide calls this out directly: “the usage of multiple tools creates fragmentation, or silos/islands of automation, that makes it difficult to automate an end-to-end network service.”
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Enterprises today rely on a patchwork of DIY scripts, open-source frameworks, and domain-specific tools. This “tool sprawl” creates automation islands – disconnected, domain-specific processes that are hard to scale, secure, or govern.
To s쳮d, organizations need to use one of those network automation platforms that orchestrates workflows across their entire network ecosystem. As environments grow more complex, only a unified approach can drive agility, reduce risk, and deliver consistent outcomes across provisioning, change, and incident management.
In other words, automation alone isn’t enough. Enterprises need a consistent, scalable way to execute and orchestrate across an increasingly diverse and dynamic technology landscape.
The 2025 Market Guide affirms the exact shift Itential was built to support. As the only cloud-native platform that combines automation execution, workflow orchestration, and toolchain integration, Itential enables enterprises to operationalize automation across any combination of CLI, API, or AI-driven Model Context Protocols (MCP).
We believe in using the right tool for the right job – and in giving teams a platform that brings it all together:
Gartner, Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms, Ted Corbett, Chris Saunderson, Andrew Lerner, 7th April 2025.
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