The latest Gartner Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms documents a fundamental shift in this market. After years of incremental change, Gartner says the category is now entering a period of accelerated innovation and disruption, driven by agentic AI. Probabilistic automation and spec-driven intent are becoming more important than configuration management. Network change configuration management (NCCM) – the long-time anchor of this market – is declining in relevance.
Itential is named as a Representative Vendor in the report. The criteria Gartner uses to define a good Network Automation Platform – deterministic plus probabilistic automation, modular adoption, open APIs and MCP, leveraging existing tools rather than rip-and-replace, and spec-driven workflows – describe what Itential has been building toward for years.
Gartner’s strategic planning assumption: by the end of 2027, 80% of network automation platform vendors will introduce agentic AI capabilities that enable probabilistic automation, up from less than 20% in early 2026.
Gartner’s key findings frame a market in motion. Four points stand out:
For most of the last decade, Network Automation Platforms were anchored in configuration management. Network change configuration management – backup, restore, drift detection, gold templates – was the primary reason enterprises invested in commercial automation. The center of gravity was the config file.
Gartner is calling that era over. As platforms increasingly derive configurations dynamically from declared intent, direct configuration management becomes less critical. The platform doesn’t need to manage the config – it needs to satisfy the spec. Control moves up the stack.
This is more than a product update. It’s a category reset. Vendors built around NCCM are now competing in a market where their core capability is becoming a feature, not a category.
The same shift is happening on the automation side. Deterministic workflows – predefined, structured, GUI-built – were designed for known activities. They break down on complex troubleshooting, multivendor incident resolution, and root-cause analysis where static workflows simply can’t anticipate every scenario.
Agentic NetOps software changes that math. AI agents can reason, plan, and execute within governance boundaries. They handle novel issues without requiring operators to define workflows in advance. Gartner expects this capability to reshape the vendor landscape, and notes that Model Context Protocol (MCP) and open-source projects like NetClaw will further lower the barriers to entry.
Gartner identifies Spec-Driven Development as an emerging use case – observed today only in the most mature clients, often technology companies – where SREs and developers use AI-native coding tools to provision and troubleshoot infrastructure directly from their native environment. Specifications live in Git. AI agents reason, render plans, and write configurations into CI/CD pipelines with human approvers in the loop.
Gartner has a name for this pattern: VibeOps. It’s exactly the operating model Itential has been engineering for – and the one our customers, partners, and the broader practitioner community have rallied around through the VibeOps Forum. Itential also released Builder Skills in the Anthropic Marketplace for Spec-Driven Development.
Gartner is specific about what defines a strong Network Automation Platform in this new market. The criteria are worth reading carefully – because they describe what enterprises should expect from any vendor they’re evaluating.
The Itential Platform was architected for exactly the shift Gartner is now describing. We didn’t pivot to agentic operations – we built toward it. Here’s how the platform maps to Gartner’s criteria for a strong NAP:
| What Gartner Recommends | How Itential Delivers |
|---|---|
| Both Deterministic & Probabilistic Automation | FlowAI orchestrates AI reasoning. The Itential Platform executes deterministically. Same control plane. |
| Modular Adoption | Build, integrate, execute, govern, and operate are independent capabilities sharing one platform. Start where the value is. |
| Leverage Existing Tools (Ansible, Python, Terraform) | Unified execution across CLI, API, Ansible, Python, OpenTofu, and more – from a single control point. No rip-and-replace. |
| Open RESTful APIs Exposing 80%+ of Functionality | Fully API-driven platform. Documented, versioned, and reverse-compatible. Plus MCP support via FlowMCP Gateway and Itential MCP Server. |
| Spec-Driven Document Support | Spec-driven development is a first-class workflow. Specifications live in Git. Agents read, reason, and render. Deterministic execution closes the loop. |
| Turnkey Integrations (ServiceNow, Dynatrace, Splunk) | Open source, generally available connectors for ServiceNow, CMDBs, telemetry platforms, public clouds, and infrastructure controllers. |
| Human-in-the-Loop, Gradual Probabilistic Enablement | Every agentic action is governed by RBAC, audit, and approval gates. Trust grows in stages – not all at once. |
| Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor | Multi-vendor and multi-domain support across Data center, cloud, campus, WAN, SASE. Cisco, Arista, Juniper, NVIDIA, F5, Palo Alto, and dozens more – across products and OS generations. |
Gartner, Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms, Andrew Lerner, Simon Richard, 29 April 2026.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
See how Itential connects AI reasoning to governed execution across your entire infrastructure.
