Network Automation Platforms

Gartner's Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms, published April 7, 2025, contains the most self-critical prediction in any current analyst document: by the end of 2028, over 80 percent of comprehensive network automation initiatives will have been shelved due to persistent skills scarcity and inadequate funding, up from less than 10 percent in 2024. The guide predicts most of its own market's projects will fail, and names the missing piece.

The market that predicts its own shelving

The network automation market's promise is old: automate the manual work of the network, the changes, the configurations, the operations. The delivery has been hard, and the guide's statistics say how hard: 67 percent of enterprise network activity is still performed manually, and 80 percent of automation efforts stall due to skills scarcity, silos, and complexity.

The shelving prediction is the market's honest self-assessment, and it is the buyer's most useful document because of it. The vendor field sells the outcome; the guide measures the gap between the outcome and the market's ability to reach it.

The guide predicts most of its own projects will be shelved, and the prediction is the market's most valuable content.

The April 2025 Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms, and its failure statistics

The edition published April 7, 2025, authored by Ted Corbett, Chris Saunderson, and Andrew Lerner, following the November 2023 edition.

The statistics are the buyer's reality check, in sequence. 67 percent of network activity manual. 80 percent of automation efforts stalling. Most enterprises running three or more automation tools, with the sprawl creating islands of automation that prevent the end-to-end service. And the predictions: the 80 percent shelving rate by 2028, and the counterweight, over 30 percent of enterprises maintaining a real-time network source of truth by 2028, up from under 5 percent.

The confirmed representative vendors include Itential, recognized for the fifth consecutive time, NetBrain, and Resolve Systems, with the Peer Insights field adding Cisco Crosswork, Juniper Apstra, Gluware, and others.

The 80 percent prediction

The shelving prediction deserves the slow reading, because it re-prices the buyer's own project.

The prediction names two causes: skills scarcity and inadequate funding. The skills scarcity is the market's structural problem, the engineers who can build network automation are rare and expensive, and the organizations that hired them found the platform investment also needed the ongoing engineering to keep it alive. The funding gap is the consequence: the platform was bought as a project, and the project ended when the budget year did.

The prediction is not about the technology failing. It is about the organizations failing the technology, and the buyer who reads it can plan against it: fund the skills, not just the license.

The source of truth prerequisite

The guide's sharpest recommendation is the counterweight to the failure prediction: invest in a modern network source of truth, the NSoT, to scale automation efforts, with the projection that 30 percent of enterprises will maintain one by 2028.

The NSoT is the market's missing piece, and the guide says so plainly: the automation layer that does not know the network's current state automates a fiction. The source of truth, the authoritative record of devices, configurations, and intent, is what lets the automation act correctly at scale, and its absence is why the islands of automation never connect.

The source of truth is the prerequisite nobody budgets for, and the 30 percent projection is the guide's bet on who learns the lesson.

From tools to platforms

The guide's central distinction is the market's maturation path: the shift from automating tasks with tools to orchestrating workflows with platforms.

The tools automate the single job: the Python script, the Ansible playbook, the vendor's controller. The platform orchestrates the end-to-end process across vendors and domains, with the workflow layer, the low-code interface, and the event-driven automation that spans provisioning and day-two operations. The guide's must-have capabilities follow: leverage the existing investments, the Ansible and Python already in place, ship the turnkey integrations with ServiceNow, Teams, Kubernetes, and the rest, expose the open APIs, and treat the public cloud as a first-class citizen.

A platform orchestrates what the tools automate, and the market's buyers are being told to move from the first to the second before the 2028 shelving wave reaches them.

What the guide cannot automate for you

A Market Guide names representative vendors and does not rank them, and its honest limit is the organizational work the statistics describe: the skills, the funding, and the operating model are the buyer's, and no platform ships them.

The other limit is the market's own speed: the guide is fifteen months old, the agentic layer, the AI-driven network operations the vendors now sell, is newer than the guide's framework, and the buyer evaluating the current field is evaluating capabilities the guide predates.

Four questions for the network buyer

Is the project funded like a capability or a project? The 80 percent prediction is the funding question. Ask for the multi-year budget, the staffing plan, and the operating model, because the shelving wave hits the project-funded initiatives first.

Where is the source of truth? The NSoT is the guide's named prerequisite. Ask whether the purchase includes building it, and what the automation does without it, because the answer reveals the project's real foundation.

Platform or another tool? The tools-to-platforms shift is the buyer's fork. Ask which end-to-end workflows the platform orchestrates today, across which vendors, demonstrated on the buyer's own estate.

Who runs it after the vendor leaves? The skills scarcity is the market's structural problem. Ask for the training, the managed services option, and the handover plan, because the platform without operators is the shelving prediction in waiting.

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