Network-as-a-service (NaaS). The means to rent networking services via the cloud. On paper it sounds ideal: customers can operate their own networks without the task of having to maintain their own infrastructure, and a vendor like Alkira, Megaport, or Nile does the heavy lifting.

But in reality, the concept is somewhat skewed.

A recent Futurum Group report described NaaS as “a small wallet with an outsized pipeline,” with low market adoption (13%) despite 62% of enterprises actively evaluating potential production rollouts.

But just a few weeks prior, a Gartner report went the other way around, labelling it as “overhyped” and placing it firmly in its “trough of disillusionment.” NaaS found itself in the waning portion of the analyst firm’s hype cycle alongside more mature technologies like 5G, and function accelerator cards like data processing units (DPUs) or smart network interface cards (NICs).

Gartner claimed vendors were positioning array services as NaaS but were “rarely” meeting formal definitions and described the offering as “adolescent.”

For a market segment meant to be growing and maturing, such a placement is quite damning, with the analyst giant projecting its time to plateau into the “slope of enlightenment” between two to five years.

Not so, says Nile Chief Marketing Officer Shashi Kiran, who argues that placement in the trough of disillusionment is all part of the maturing process, likening it to “the darkness before the dawn.”

“It has passed the hype cycle where there's just an insane amount of noise, everybody's trying to posture themselves, and [for] NaaS, historically providers have owned the terminology," Kiran said.

Kiran stressed that the increased penetration of software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a service in the enterprise market, vendors providing such services aren’t operating the technology but owning it to make customer lives easier.

The potential trigger that could push NaaS’ maturity even further in the exec’s eyes is AI.

Kiran argued that the forced infrastructure revamps brought on by the technology and subsequent rising component costs puts NaaS in a better light. No need to manage stacks or jump on hardware recycles.

“Whatever was costing $1 is now costing $5 and the price volatility has gone up, so [companies] are looking for opex-based solutions,” Kiran said.

That cost saving consideration extends to security, with many vendors investing heavily in making NaaS offerings secure, with the exec adding: “Security cannot be reactive, it has to be natively baked into the architecture.”

Beyond the inevitable and obvious spectre of AI, technologies further along the maturity slope of Gartner’s hype cycle could also have an impact helping NaaS break on through to the other side.

Applications like networking AI assistants, quantum key distribution (QKD) for securing workloads, and network security microsegmentation are rapidly blurring the lines across the networking stack and helping to automate and make networks operate with limited to no human intervention, concepts central to helping customers adopt NaaS as they wouldn’t need dedicated technically minded engineers as such.

“These are no longer discrete components. … AI is no longer something that you layer on. We have actually built things from AI, because the other thing is autonomous operations. It's not just the technology, but how autonomously you can operate it,” Kiran said. “If it's something built to be autonomous, then it has, I guess, a greater degree of maturity than something that is being retrofitted to become autonomous.”

“NaaS as a terminology has some baggage, just because it's being used by telcos and managed service providers, and people think of NaaS in that context, but it's evolving,” Kiran added. “The signal needs to be much clearer than the noise, and I think we're getting into that phase … [customers] are tired of dealing with multiple licenses, multiple vendors, just the operational logistics of it. Part of it is just the understanding of the awareness of the existence and understanding the solution.”