Today, I’m excited to announce the creation of our new business, NetBox Labs. At NetBox Labs, we’re on a mission to make management of complex networks easier for operators. With this announcement, we’re taking a huge step forward.
“At NetBox Labs, we’re on a mission to make management of complex networks easier for operators”
NetBox Labs is born of NS1’s investment in NetBox, the leading Network Source of Truth. The NS1 NetBox team, including project founder and lead maintainer Jeremy Stretch, along with the Orb team and other leaders from NS1, are joining NetBox Labs. This represents a significant expansion of our support for the incredible NetBox community, complementing it with the easy to use, enterprise grade NetBox Cloud solution.
We first started to focus on NetBox in 2021. Our most important priority was supporting the vibrant NetBox open source community. That remains true today. We’ve learned there is an incredible flywheel between supporting the open source NetBox project and delivering NetBox Cloud, a commercial offering that enhances the value of NetBox and lowers barriers for NetOps teams to improve their operations with modernization and automation. We built a team at NS1 to contribute to open source NetBox and build NetBox Cloud in early 2022, and began serving Cloud customers soon thereafter. As we kick off 2023, NetBox Cloud is a rapidly growing business with dozens of enterprise customers, and our support for the NetBox community is growing faster than ever. We’ve proven we can build a great business by investing in and empowering the open source NetBox community.
“We’ve proven we can build a great business by investing in and empowering the open source NetBox community”
We’ve also had incredible engagement with Networking teams, both in the community and as customers. We’ve learned that there is a massive opportunity to enable Networking teams to get leverage through better documentation of their networks and integrated NetOps tooling for management and automation. Networks are more complex than ever, and Networking teams are under pressure. According to EMA Research’s 2022 report on Network Management Megatrends, only 27% of Network Operations teams feel they are successful with their missions – down nearly 50% over the last few years. Networking teams have told us they need open, composable tools that adapt to their environments, work with their ecosystem, and unlock efficiency and automation.
NetBox Labs is building that open, composable network automation stack for Networking teams. While NetBox is core to achieving this, our vision extends to the broader requirements of modern networking, such as Observability and Automation tooling. That’s why NetBox Labs is also the new home of Orb, the next generation open source Network Observability platform originally built at NS1. We will also continue to invest in the overall network automation ecosystem. We believe in the power of open source, open integration, and the importance of composability of tools to address the unique challenges of every Networking team.
The formation of NetBox Labs is a gigantic win for the NetBox, Orb, and network automation open source communities. NetBox and Orb’s founders and lead maintainers, Jeremy Stretch and Shannon Weyrick, respectively, are leading our strategy to help drive even more success for these incredible projects. As an “open source native” business, we will seek to generate commercial success from differentiated offerings like NetBox Cloud, which will enable us to expand our open source investments while building and supporting new projects and the open source network automation ecosystem at large, which we will continue to do.
NetBox Labs also represents a huge win for NetBox Cloud customers as we expand our dedicated investment in the product. We are committed to delivering value to NetBox Cloud customers above and beyond what it makes sense to deliver as open source software. This year NetBox Cloud customers can expect continued expansion of our enterprise-grade features, a focus on ease of use and integration into your broader stack, tightly integrated network observability capabilities powered by Orb, and an obsession with eliminating toil for Networking teams through workflow improvements and automation.
We are thrilled to be setting off on this NetBox Labs journey with our community and customers and we hope you’ll come along for the ride!
- Follow @NetBoxLabs on Twitter (and @NetBoxOfficial for open source NetBox updates)
- Join the NetDev Community Slack to discuss NetBox and Orb
- Learn more about the open source projects supported by NetBox Labs
- Sign up to try NetBox Cloud today
