Itential

Itential was founded in 2014 by Chris Wade and Ian Bresnahan to address the increasing complexity of network management. Bresnahan, now President and CEO, and Wade, the CTO, both brought extensive experience from leadership roles at companies like Alcatel-Lucent, drawing on their backgrounds in service assurance and network technologies to shape Itential's direction. They identified a critical market need as network infrastructure began shifting to the cloud, mirroring the earlier transitions of storage and compute, yet management practices remained largely manual and cumbersome.

The Atlanta-based company provides a low-code software platform for network automation and orchestration, designed to work across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Itential's business model is centered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, generating revenue by providing enterprise-grade solutions to a diverse client base that includes Fortune 500 companies in financial services, communications service providers, healthcare organizations, and U.S. federal agencies. The firm has secured significant funding to fuel its growth, including a $5.5 million Series A in 2017 and a $20 million Series B in 2021, both led by Elsewhere Partners.

The core offering is the Itential Automation Platform, which empowers network operations (NetOps), IT, and infrastructure teams to unify and scale their automation efforts. A key feature is its ability to integrate with an organization's existing ecosystem of tools, including ITSM systems like ServiceNow, CI/CD pipelines, and various network vendors, without requiring clients to discard their current automation assets like Python scripts or Ansible playbooks. The platform employs a low-code, drag-and-drop design studio for creating automation workflows, making the process accessible to engineers without deep programming expertise. It also includes features for configuration management using Golden Configuration templates to ensure compliance, and a self-service catalog that allows teams outside of network operations to consume network resources securely via APIs. By treating the network as code, Itential helps organizations manage changes, validate configurations before deployment, and orchestrate complex processes across physical, virtual, and cloud domains.

Keywords: network automation, network orchestration, low-code automation, hybrid cloud management, infrastructure as code, NetOps, network configuration management, multi-cloud networking, infrastructure automation, network compliance, self-service networking, API integration, ServiceNow integration, Ansible automation, network service delivery, digital transformation, telecom network automation, financial services networking, federal government networks, enterprise IT automation