Networking vendor NetGear updated its cloud network management to democratize AI for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs).

The firm touted Netgear Insight 10.0 as embedding intelligence, proactive recommendations, and AI-assisted workflows directly into the network management workflow. Built on a secure cloud-native foundation, the platform promises continuous availability across distributed environments, aiding operational data into to be turned into actionable, single-platform insights.

NetGear said it believed smaller businesses "deserve similar intelligence, automation, and operational capabilities available to the world's largest enterprises." One happy customer of the platform in beta was Kenny Red, CTO at CTI, who claimed Insight's new interface is "sharper, onboarding is faster, and the platform handles the two things that cost integrators the most time: post-deployment troubleshooting and manual network configuration. That's a meaningful change, and it shows up in how we deliver."

"The future of networking is about giving organizations the intelligence to operate increasingly complex environments with confidence," said Pramod Badjate, president and general manager of NetGear Enterprise. “As AI transforms every business, networks must become more adaptive, more automated, and easier to operate. Insight 10.0 is the foundation for our vision of AIOps (AI for IT operations) and AI-defined networking for the millions of small and medium-sized organizations that have historically been underserved by enterprise networking solutions. We're bringing enterprise-class intelligence to businesses without enterprise-sized IT teams."

The Insight 10.0 release comes as NetGear – fresh off of its reprieve from the U.S. router ban – aims to provide an SME-based USP in the AIOps realm.

Extreme Networks may be among its closest rivals in this regard, with its Extreme Partner First aiming to simplify pricing and benefits while giving access to Extreme’s MSP-friendly, multi-tenant Platform One. Launched last year, the network visualization offering incorporates agentic AI to optimize performance and reliability while helping network operators to identify bandwidth spikes and security threats.