Even now in 2023, far too many network administrators manage enterprise network management assets with a basic spreadsheet. It's a situation that New York-based open source vendor NetBox Labs is looking to change.

The open source NetBox project provides a set of capabilities to help organizations manage network resources. NetBox includes IP address management (IPAM) as well as data center infrastructure management (DCIM) capabilities, alongside a series of integrations and APIs for network automation.

The need to build out NetBox Labs as its own business became apparent to NS1 founder Kris Beevers for a variety of reasons. The DNS capabilities that NS1's core business provides helps large organizations manage internet traffic and routing. In Beevers' view, the use case for NetBox is much broader. Beevers is now the CEO of NetBox Labs.

"The kinds of companies that are using NetBox are not just the world's coolest SaaS or consumer applications, it's anyone with a network, which is everybody," Beevers told SDxCentral. "So we found ourselves looking to engage, interact, sell and support a much broader market."

NetBox Labs today announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding to help advance its open source network management and automation technology. NetBox Labs was officially spun out from managed DNS provider NS1 on Feb. 28 after NS1 itself was acquired by IBM. IBM is now also an investor in NetBox Labs.

NetBox push into enterprise network management is about the cloud

As part of NS1, Beevers launched the NetBox Cloud service in August 2021 as a managed enterprise-grade offering.

Beevers commented that since the initial launch of NetBox Cloud, his team has learned a lot about the needs of enterprise networking teams with respect to consuming cloud services.

"Part of why we've grown this business, spun it out and are raising money, is because it is apparent now that enterprise networking teams are ready to consume cloud services," Beevers said. "That was not apparent at the outset."

NetBox Cloud has been steadily improving over the past year, with enhanced enterprise grade capabilities on top of the open source base. Among the capabilities are additional security, reliability, reporting and auditing features. The big focus overall is on how to lower the barriers to adoption and make it easier for organizations to adopt.

"This is sort of amusing but the most common competitive, if you call it that, technology that we run into with companies that are seeking to go down the NetBox path, is Excel," Beevers said. "We have found even Fortune 500 organizations that are running their network resource management strategies with spreadsheets."

Greenfield networks are few and far between

The reality for NetBox deployments today is that few organizations are building entirely new environments.

"We are introducing a greenfield network management and automation technology stack into a brownfield network situation," Beevers said.

As such, Beevers noted a lot of the work that NetBox Labs continues to do is making it easy for existing networks to benefit from NetBox management. Part of that effort is in the introduction of automated discovery for network assets to help reduce or in some cases eliminate the need for manual data entry.

"A lot of what we see directly at NetBox are enterprise IT teams seeking to modernize and automate in part to regain some control," Beevers said. "Especially in this macro environment, that really matters a lot because part of control is the enterprise needing to manage the costs of the underlying infrastructure of the business."

The future of NetBox includes a healthy dose of AI

Looking forward, Beevers hinted at future integration with generative AI technologies to help further ease network management.

Beevers said that in his view generative AI is a deeply promising and opportunity for the type of data that NetBox has and the workflow it enables for network management. He noted that the more naturally that NetBox can enable workflows with different approaches including chat interfaces and other AI tools, the easier it will be to streamline workflows.

"AI is going to transform the way network engineers work every day and that's part of what we're gonna do," Beevers said.