Inside the 2025 Gartner I&O Guide: Why Product Thinking Is Reshaping Infrastructure Delivery

Intro: A Shift in Expectations

The pressure on infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders has never been higher. You’re expected to deliver faster, with fewer resources, across increasingly complex environments — and do it all without compromising governance, security, or reliability. But most automation efforts remain fragmented, reliant on scripts and isolated tools that can’t scale beyond individual teams or domains.

Following the release of the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms, which recognized Itential as a Representative Vendor, Gartner has now published its 2025 Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration Tools. Both of these reports reinforces a critical message: traditional approaches to infrastructure automation — task-based, fragmented, and tool-specific — isn’t enough. Infrastructure delivery is evolving. And so must the platforms and practices behind it.

One of the most significant shifts highlighted in the report is the movement toward productizing infrastructure. That means delivering infrastructure as a standardized, reusable service — not a one-off project or script.

This evolution is being led by platform engineering teams, who are taking inspiration from DevOps and software product teams. The result? Infrastructure that’s designed for consumption, not just execution.

But here’s the catch: most organizations still struggle to get there. According to Gartner, only 23% of enterprises have successfully integrated automation into service delivery. The rest are stuck in fragmented efforts — isolated automations, DIY scripts, and domain-specific tools that don’t scale.

Why are so many automation efforts stalling? Gartner points to a familiar culprit: orchestration remains underutilized, largely due to perceived complexity and skills gaps.

This is a critical insight. Orchestration isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s the missing layer that enables teams to connect automation across systems, teams, and workflows. It’s what transforms automation into something scalable, governable, and aligned to business outcomes.

As Gartner puts it:

The use of multiple tools creates fragmentation… that makes it difficult to deliver standardized, repeatable, and scalable infrastructure services.

To productize infrastructure, you need to orchestrate it.

The report outlines a clear direction for I&O leaders. It’s not about adding more tools — it’s about investing in platforms that unify what you already have. Specifically, Gartner recommends platforms that:

• Unify provisioning, configuration, and orchestration.
• Support hybrid infrastructure (on-prem, cloud, edge).
• Offer low-code and self-service interfaces.
• Integrate seamlessly into the ecosystem — from ITSM to CI/CD.
• Enable platform engineering and infrastructure-as-a-product delivery.
• Are future-ready for AI-augmented and agentic automation.

This is no longer a wish list — it’s becoming the baseline.

At Itential, we’ve spent years building toward the vision Gartner lays out in its 2025 Market Guide. We’ve always believed that automation, on its own, is not enough — infrastructure must be orchestrated, governed, and delivered as a service to drive real business outcomes.

Itential’s cloud-native platform was designed to help infrastructure and platform engineering teams make that shift — not by replacing what they already have, but by unifying and operationalizing it.

With Itential, teams can: 

• Orchestrate Full-Service Workflows
  Automate the complete lifecycle of infrastructure services — from provisioning and configuration to change, compliance, and remediation — across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
• Expose Automation as Reusable, Self-Service Offerings
  Publish standardized workflows for internal consumers via portals, APIs, or ITSM tools — making infrastructure accessible without manual handoffs.
• Integrate Across Your Ecosystem
  Seamlessly connect with existing tools like Ansible, OpenTofu, Terraform, ServiceNow, NetBox, Git, and more — without needing to rewrite or rebuild your automation.
• Support Platform Engineering & Infrastructure as a Product Delivery
  Enable your team to treat infrastructure like a product — modular, version-controlled, and designed for scale — while giving developers and app teams access to infrastructure through structured, governed interfaces.
• Bridge AI Into Real Execution
  Connect AI-generated actions to orchestration logic that enforces policy, collects inputs, and executes safely — enabling GenAI and agentic automation to operate in production.

If your organization is embracing platform engineering, product thinking, or self-service infrastructure — Itential provides the orchestration layer that makes those strategies real, secure, and scalable.

Explore the Platform’s Capabilities

The message from Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide is clear: the expectations for infrastructure delivery are changing — and so must the approach. Task-based automation isn’t going to meet the scale, speed, or reliability demands of modern business. Leaders need to think beyond execution and start managing infrastructure like a product.

That means shifting from:

• Scattered scripts ➡️ Orchestrated workflows
• Ticket-based delivery ➡️ Reusable, self-service services
• Tools ➡️ Platforms

The organizations that embrace this mindset — and invest in the platforms that enable it — will be the ones that move faster, reduce operational risk, and deliver infrastructure as a competitive advantage.

If you’re an I&O leader facing this transformation, here are a few questions to ask:

• Can your automation efforts scale across environments and teams?
• Are you still relying on isolated scripts and tools, or are you building workflows?
• Do your teams have the interfaces and integrations they need to move faster — without compromising control?
• Are you ready to support the needs of platform engineering and GenAI?

If the answer to any of these is “not yet,” now is the time to reevaluate.