LAS VEGAS, NV – Networking vendors have a tendency to erroneously use the term 'innovative', and that gives end users the wrong idea, Gartner VP Analyst Andrew Lerner said during the firm's infrastructure and operations (I&O) cloud strategies conference.

He described vendors' relationship with the word innovation as “very interesting” and then acknowledged the substantial number of networking vendors represented in the audience.

“You deliver a lot of value to the market. We wouldn't be here without you. So thank you for all that you do, but you use the word innovation incorrectly,” Lerner said.

These networking vendors typically market anything that's new as innovative, even if it's 15.5.2 advancing to 15.5.3. “That's not innovation,” he said, even though the new pieces may be beneficial or represent genuine improvements. “That makes it hard for us, as end users, to really discern what's real innovation,” he said.

True innovation, according to Gartner, requires taking risks, trailblazing, and trying new concepts and ideas, “which means you're not always going to be successful.” But at the end of the day, “that's how you create a business opportunity. That's how you solve a new problem,” Lerner said.

In the context of a networking tool, for example, “you might have to find a targeted deployment or targeted location in the environment where you can try to deploy something. That's generally how networking innovation is packaged,” not in incremental upgrades, he explained.

Lerner highlighted five key areas of network innovation from Gartner's point of view: universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA), NetDevOps, multicloud networking software, network-as-a-service (NaaS), and secure access service edge (SASE).

ZTNA as its commonly known today is “new and improved VPN remote access delivered as-a-service. It supports remote access users, it connects them, [and] it authenticates them,” Lerner explained. However, he expects a more universal ZTNA model to drive innovation in the future by extending ZTNA onto enterprise campus workers and devices.

Another networking technology representing true innovation is NetDevOps, which isn't a product to buy but a style of working. “Essentially, it entails applying DevOps or agile software principles to networking. What that means is you decompose a networking activity – that could be a provisioning activity, or a troubleshooting activity – and you decompose it into finite, specific pieces. And you automate, and test the heck out of those individual pieces, and document it. It's basically similar to how you move software through an agile pipeline,” he explained.

The deployment side of NetDevOps is a bit different from traditional DevOps deployment processes in that “you don't just take the new code and drop it into production,” Lerner said. Instead, you drop code into a software version control system that represents how the network should be set up, “and then production pulls from that,” he said.

“It's a very different kind of process. And again, it steals from agile software principles design where there's a lot of automation and testing built in,” Lerner noted.

Gartner predicts just 5-10% of individuals automate more than half of their networking activities like provisioning or troubleshooting. By 2025, however, analysts expect that figure to rise to 25% as a result of NetDevOps and other factors, according to Lerner.