Summary

Itential recently announced integration with Red Hat's Ansible Network Automation, allowing operations to initiate and automate network changes without writing any code. Itential's low-code workflows are designed to streamline the building of automated workflows and speed operational management.


The 451 Take

Itential is positioning itself as an automated network orchestration platform built for modern, agile networks and IT organizations. Its workflow architecture mirrors the domain expertise embodied with DevOps, allowing the two groups to focus on their particular domain and then come together in an automated system. It's a lofty goal and is reflected in the product, but it will have a difficult time convincing enterprises that have already bought into SDN and network automation why it's necessary. The Itential platform is well suited for organizations with diverse networks that are already extensively automating workflows, but it will also serve organizations starting out with network automation that want to get started on the right path.

Context

Software-defined networking struggles to gain traction in enterprises, but the requirement for integrated and agile networking is growing. Enterprise IT needs to bring the network into the automated fold to better manage competing and changing application demands in the datacenter, co-lo and the cloud.

DevOps is a vague idea that modern enterprises should be adopting, but how those strategies are adopted and the form they take varies. On the surface, DevOps joins together developers and operations into a collaborative unit, but many of the IT processes and IT management products were built for domain silos, causing an organizational shift to be difficult to make.

Some professionals – software developers and IT administrators – can cross over from one domain to another, but in doing so, expertise is lost in both domains. DevOps and other business-agile goals need both a change in organizational structure and workflows that can be implemented in management software and systems.

 

Strategy

Itential's customer focus is in managed services providers (MSPs) and large enterprises with service provider-like networks. The company's goal is to close the capability gap between SDN, SD-WAN and intent-based networking products and IT administrator's network operations skills and experience. Programmability and automation aren't new to enterprise networking, but in most cases, the automation has been confined to a narrow niche of deployments with limited scope, and enterprises struggle to cross the chasm to more robust automation that spans multiple IT systems and management domains.

Enterprises, for example, want a 'crawl, walk, run' approach to automation that fits with their current workflows and can be adapted in the future. Itential supports this phased-style approach, allowing enterprises to add manual checks and balances, and modify existing workflows with very low operational overhead and no code needed. Using a drag-and-drop interface with reusable modules, IT can quickly set up and modify workflows as well as monitor the progress of running tasks.

The challenge for enterprises moving to a DevOps model is in expecting developers to become network administrators, and expecting network administrators to become developers. Those are two separate domains with separate skill sets. Itential's workflows enable domain experts to work on their particular part of the process.

Developers can create applications and integrate with Itential without knowing anything about the network. Network IT can configure the network models and workflows without writing a line of code. By federating the process between domain experts and joining them together in an orchestration platform, Itential forces customers into the collaborative process that is found in successful DevOps IT shops.

 

Financial

Itential was founded on 2014, and was funded by the founders at inception. Itential is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and has offices in EMEA. The company has approximately 100 employees. Itential announced $5.5m in funding – its first venture round – in September 2017 from Elsewhere Partners to fund additional R&D and marketing. It claims to have six of the 10 largest service providers, and three of the five largest financial services companies as customers, but has no public references available.

Itential has customers in North America, EMEA, LATAM and APAC. It sells through a direct model where, at the time of this report, it receives 65% of its revenue direct from customers and 35% of revenue indirect through the channel. It is working on a channel enablement program to allow indirect sellers to on-board customers and provide professional services. Itential has joint go-to-market relationships with Cisco and Red Hat.

 

Products

The Itential platform is modular in nature. The core platform contains features necessary for the system, such as a three-node data base with an arbiter to ensure high availability, resiliency and performance. In addition, the servers in the platform for the core functions, authentication, role-based access control, the workflow engine and auditing are stateless applications that can be scaled out as needed and, being stateless (relying on the centralized database) are themselves resilient.

Additional applications like configuration management, policy management, gold standard configurations and service management are optional modules that are separately licensed for the system. The Itential platform implements several components that provide the integration and functionality for the system:

  • Adapters interface with external systems for data collection and command and control channels, and interact with Brokers. Adapters are device-specific and can be created by Itential, technology vendors or customers. Itential has a low-code application that assists in building Adapters.
  • Brokers provide a federation layer between Cogs that contains business logic and the integrated southbound Adapters. Brokers collect and unify data and data models from southbound Adapters, presenting a consistent data set and command structure to Cogs. Each Broker synthesizes and interacts with one or more similar adapters, like network devices.
  • Cogs encapsulate the business logic necessary to carry out the actions initiated from applications and other integrated management applications. Cogs are represented as RESTful interfaces that external applications will use to interact with Itential.
  • Applications provide the workflows and user interface elements to manage system policy, create workflows and create visualizations.

With this modular architecture, Itential, customers, integrators and technology partners can integrate with Itential, automating tasks from within the product or from the customer's existing management platforms. A critical point to make is that Itential doesn't create separate network and system models upon which it acts.

Itential models workflows independent of the underlying products in the network. It relies on the integrated southbound systems to create the domain-specific models that Itential can use in real time. If a customer doesn't have a central model repository, Itential recommends using Ansible or a similar product.

 

Competition

Competition in this segment comes in many forms, both direct and indirect. Direct competition in automation and orchestration comes from companies like Apstra, Forward Networks and Glue Networks, all of which are also Itential's integration partners. For organizations that have settled on one network automation and orchestration product like the ones mentioned, there is little need to consider Itential.

Network automation products support CLI and API-driven network products and offer east-west bound and northbound integration points for management and support systems. Itential is differentiated in supporting multiple network management and orchestration systems, and federating modeling and command and control across them. Itential is better suited for larger enterprises and service providers that have a diverse infrastructure.

Indirect sources come from network and datacenter management products that also provide integration and automation features such as OpenStack and VMware's vRealize suite, and SDN products like Cisco ACI, Nuage Networks Virtualized Cloud Services and VMware NSX. Management products such as these have technology ecosystems built up that can automate tasks with a more tightly controlled ecosystem of integrated products, and these enterprises and service providers don't need the flexibility and versatility of Itential, nor the mentioned products like Apstra, Forward Networks and Glue Networks. Like similar products, Itential will have to keep pace with integrated product capabilities as new versions become available.


Itential SWOT Figure 1

Mike Fratto
Senior Analyst, Applied Infrastructure & DevOps

Mike Fratto is a senior analyst on 451 Research’s Applied Infrastructure and DevOps team covering enterprise networking. He has extensive experience reviewing and writing about enterprise remote access, security and network infrastructure products, as well as consulting with enterprise IT, equipment and software vendors, and service providers.

Jeremy Korn
Research Associate

Jeremy Korn is a Research Associate at 451 Research. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Biology and East Asian Studies and received a MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he employed quantitative and qualitative methodologies to study the Chinese film industry.

Aaron Sherrill
Senior Analyst

Aaron Sherrill is a Senior Analyst for 451 Research covering emerging trends, innovation and disruption in the Managed Services and Managed Security Services sectors. Aaron has 20+ years of experience across several industries including serving in IT management for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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