Gartner defines the market of artificial intelligence (AI) in communications service provider (CSP) network operations as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products with offerings in the form of capabilities embedded in CSP-specific operational technology (OT) applications or industry-agnostic horizontal applications. These products enable AI/machine learning (ML)-based network operations in CSPs.
“Application testing services” is a comprehensive term for the verification and validation services that support quality control and quality assurance (QA) of clients’ applications. Verification assesses whether a product/application or service complies with regulations, requirements, specifications or enforced constraints. Validation typically involves engagement with external customers to confirm suitability and acceptance. Infrastructure testing services, mobile device testing and software testing tools created for the market by independent software vendors (ISVs) are not included in this definition.
Gartner defines backup and data protection platforms as technologies that capture point-in-time copies of enterprise data for the purpose of recovering it from multiple data loss scenarios, enhancing data protection initiatives, and expanding data insights and access capabilities. These technologies protect enterprise data, applications and infrastructure in hybrid, multicloud and SaaS environments. Backup and data protection platforms are available as software-only, integrated appliances and vendor-developed and hosted backup as a service (BaaS).
Gartner defines communications service provider (CSP) service design and orchestration (SD&O) solutions as a component of the operations support systems (OSSs) to enable CSPs to design, fulfill and orchestrate services. These solutions are for use in physical, virtual, containerized and hybrid network environments for their clients in various market segments, such as consumer, enterprise and wholesale. These solutions include service design tools; policy tools; service and resource orchestration solutions; automation tools; and inventory management, provisioning and activation tools.
Cloud Computing refers to products and services that enable the delivery, management, and optimization of computing resources over the internet. This category includes markets that focus on empowering organizations to seamlessly store, migrate, manage, and optimize workloads across diverse cloud environments, including public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud models.
Gartner defines cloud financial management (CFM) tools as tooling that provides the ability to collect, organize, display, optimize and manage the investments in cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). They leverage algorithms, statistical models and/or AI/machine learning (ML) in support of cost reports, dashboards and/or other mechanisms/interfaces that provide capabilities to monitor cost, utilization and value indicators. This allows users to identify trends, anomalies and misaligned expectations, as well as opportunities to increase the efficiency of cloud configurations, architecture and contracts. CFM tools enable enterprises to collect and analyze public cloud cost and usage information and apply controls to define budget and cost policies to optimize spending on a continuous basis.
Cloud management tooling enables organizations to manage hybrid and multicloud (that is, on-premises, public cloud and edge) services and resources. This includes providing governance, life cycle management, brokering and automation for managed cloud infrastructure resources across multiple functional areas. The tooling can be procured and operated by central IT organizations, such as I&O, cloud center of excellence (CCOE) and platform engineering/operations, or within specific lines of business. It can be deployed on-premises, in a customer’s public cloud account or purchased as a SaaS.
Gartner defines container management as offerings that support the deployment and operation of containerized workloads. It uses a combination of technologies (many open source) that enable agile application deployments and infrastructure modernization. Delivery methods include stand-alone software or as a service. Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.
Gartner defines the data center outsourcing (DCO) services market as a comprehensive suite of services that support deployment, consolidation, optimization, modernization and managed services. These services primarily cater to data centers, private clouds, edge computing, ERP hosting, mainframes or legacy systems, midrange systems, infrastructure modernization, network and security. Organizations with such environments engage with DCO service providers to enhance efficiency, improve agility, optimize costs, strengthen security — physical, data and cyber — and realize substantial modernization benefits. Data center outsourcing refers to the strategic decision by organizations to delegate data center operations to a third-party service provider. Adopting this approach assists organizations with prioritizing their core business activities while capitalizing on the advanced technologies, operational expertise, best-in-class performance metrics and cost-efficiencies offered by vendors, compared to insourced best efforts.
This market covers data center network switches and the requisite management and automation platforms for them. Data center switches are Ethernet switches installed in a data center environment intended to provide connectivity for endpoints, including servers, firewalls, and Layer 4 through Layer 7 appliances and mainframes. Data center switches provide foundational connectivity mostly for compute resources in the data center. This is required to enable applications in support of business requirements. Emerging use cases that drive investments on data center networks include both AI and edge compute workloads.
The data center and cloud networking vendors covered in this market provide hardware and/or software solutions to deliver connectivity primarily within enterprise data centers. This includes data center core/spine switches, access switches (top of rack [ToR], leaf), virtual switching, Ethernet fabrics, network operating systems (NOSs) and network overlays, and the requisite management, automation and orchestration of those components.
Gartner defines a data science and machine learning platform as an integrated set of code-based libraries and low-code tooling. These platforms support the independent use and collaboration among data scientists and their business and IT counterparts, with automation and AI assistance through all stages of the data science life cycle, including business understanding, data access and preparation, model creation and sharing of insights. They also support engineering workflows, including the creation of data, feature, deployment and testing pipelines. The platforms are provided via desktop client or browser with supporting compute instances or as a fully managed cloud offering.
Data and Analytics refers to products and services that enable organizations to collect, integrate, analyze, and act on data to drive informed decision-making and business outcomes. This category includes markets that focus on empowering enterprises to manage data pipelines, ensure data quality and governance, extract insights through advanced analytics, and machine learning across structured and unstructured data environments.
Enterprise Networking and Communications refers to the products and services that enable secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity and communication across distributed enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on core and edge networking, unified communications, private and public mobile networks, and managed network services—supporting digital transformation, and operational efficiency.
Gartner defines enterprise storage platforms as the market consisting of products, value-based services and delivery methods designed to support diverse block, file and object storage workloads and use cases. Products and services include appliances, software-defined storage (SDS), data management and other data storage services provided through a centrally managed, multidomain control plane. Enterprise storage platforms address IT organizational requirements to operate and support standardized enterprise storage products. They also enable organizations to adopt a platform-services-centric infrastructure approach for structured and unstructured data applications. These platforms leverage AI-enabled telemetry to provide optimal infrastructure capabilities and SLA-based IT outcomes.
Gartner defines the enterprise wired and wireless LAN market as the infrastructure that enables secure connectivity across enterprise locations. This encompasses the hardware, software, and management capabilities required to deliver physical and logical network connectivity, enforce zero-trust security principles, and automate operations across campus, branch, and remote environments, including operational technology (OT) domains. Enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructures solve the operational complexity of delivering secure, scalable connectivity across distributed enterprise environments. As organizations expand across campus, branch, remote, and operational technology domains, traditional network deployment and management approaches become too resource-intensive and inconsistent to meet business demands. The offered capabilities address the business problem of fragmented network operations by unifying life cycle management (that is, provisioning, monitoring, policy enforcement, and incident response) into a single, software-driven system. This reduces manual effort, shortens resolution times, and improves compliance with governance and security requirements. While hardware remains foundational, it is the infrastructure operations software (that is, automation, telemetry, and policy orchestration) that delivers the operational and business value enterprises seek. Tangible outcomes include faster site turn-up, proactive issue detection and remediation, consistent user experience, and alignment of network operations with enterprise workflows through IT service management (ITSM) integration. Organizations also gain flexibility through cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and network as a service (NaaS) consumption models, enabling them to scale operations efficiently while maintaining control over data and performance.
Gartner defines event intelligence solutions (EIS) as tools that apply artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to augment, accelerate and automate responses to signals or events detected from digital services. The key characteristics of event intelligence solutions include cross-domain event ingestion, topology assembly, event correlation and enrichment, pattern recognition, and accelerated remediation. These solutions are designed to process event streams into actionable insights and enable proactive responses that reduce toil and improve performance and availability. They are delivered as software as a service or self-managed software.
Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.
Gartner defines full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure software as the market consisting of complete software solutions that include virtualized compute, storage and networking from a single instantiation designed to run on-premises or in a colocation environment. It consists of those vendors that develop and sell hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software comprising the vendor’s own server virtualization, software-defined storage and network management tools. The full-stack software solution may also be integrated with a hardware stack, as a complete offering spanning both software and hardware. Recently, this market has been heavily influenced by the positioning of storage virtualization and private cloud infrastructure looking to revirtualize compute and providing alternatives to incumbent vendors.
Hadoop distributions are used to provide scalable, distributed computing against on-premises and cloud-based file store data. Distributions are composed of commercially packaged and supported editions of open-source Apache Hadoop-related projects. Distributions provide access to applications, query/reporting tools, machine learning and data management infrastructure components. First introduced as collections of components for any use case, distributions are now often delivered as part of a specific solution for data lakes, machine learning or other uses. They subsequently grow into additional, expanded roles, competing with both older technologies like database management systems (DBMSs) and newer ones like Apache Spark.
The hybrid cloud storage market comprises diverse deployment patterns with underlying technologies that address a wide range of data types. Products in this market must facilitate seamless data services across different environments, including disparate data centers, colocations, edge locations and public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud data solutions are offered through various means such as distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI), hybrid cloud storage platforms, data transfer appliances, hyperconverged solutions, storage arrays, software-defined storage (SDS) products and comprehensive data management software.
A hybrid mesh firewall (HMF) is a multideployment mode firewall, including hardware, virtual appliance and cloud-based options, with a unified cloud-based management plane. HMF’s are designed to support hybrid environments and evolving use cases by offering mature continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline integration, native cloud integration, and advanced threat prevention capabilities extending to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and DNS-based attacks. With the adoption of hybrid environments, clients prefer the same firewall vendor with centralized management and visibility of firewall policies across environments to ease administration and reduce operational complexity. As a result, the demand and adoption of cloud firewalls from the same on-premises firewall vendor is growing. Hybrid mesh firewalls support this use case through hardware, virtual and dedicated cloud firewall deployment types, along with cloud-based centralized visibility and management capability.
Gartner defines the IT asset disposition (ITAD) market with three service categories: core disposition services, secondary hardware services and ancillary life cycle services. Core disposition services are essential to ITAD processes and evaluated on a make-or-buy scale. Secondary hardware services involve acquiring used equipment from ITAD providers. Ancillary life cycle services, such as software harvesting and redeployment, are offered by full-service ITAD providers. ITAD is crucial for IT sustainability, mitigating Scope 3 emissions and supporting the circular economy.
IT Infrastructure and IoT refers to the products and services that support the deployment, management, and optimization of core technology systems and connected devices across enterprise environments. This category includes markets that focus on enabling organizations to build and operate resilient, scalable, and intelligent infrastructure. It encompasses solutions for data center management, network infrastructure, and IoT connectivity—spanning on-premises, cloud, edge, and hybrid models.
IT Resilience Orchestration (ITRO) solutions are chiefly aimed at helping to improve the reliability, speed and granularity of workload recovery due to unplanned outages by automating disaster recovery (DR) processes while lowering costs of DR exercising and DR operations staff. Gartner’s ITRO definition focuses on tools that support a majority of these capabilities: • Automated failover, failback and availability/continuity management • Replication and orchestration • Discovery, dependency mapping and workload analysis • DR management and run book creation • Reporting and validation of recovery capability
IT Security refers to products and services that protect digital systems and data from cyber threats and unauthorized access. This category includes markets that focus on network security, identity management, data protection, and cloud security, enabling organizations to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and operate securely in a digital world.
Gartner defines IT Services for Communication Service Providers (ITS-CSP) as multivendor IT services CSPs buy to: ■ Enable solutions to their customers, particularly enterprises ■ Transform their customer, partner, workforce, service or infrastructure management IT must deliver a cloud-first, agile, automation- and intelligence-based “digital factory” that can support broader corporate goals of product diversification, innovation, revenue growth and improved digital customer journeys. Geopolitical issues, ecosystems, transparency, trust and security are mission-critical in the uncertain world and add to the factors affecting CSPs’ competitiveness. Communications service providers want to buy and understand business outcomes over technology. They want their IT service partners to have a personal investment. CIOs in large CSPs would like to work with a smaller number of more strategic IT service partners. At the same time, business unit leaders also want to speed up their initiatives, creating possibilities for IT service providers. CSPs want help with revenue growth from enterprises, including joint go-to-market and new digital technology capabilities from IT service providers. Communications service providers expect cost-efficiency from automation, from IT enabling their networks and from using more cloud-delivered software capability. All this is underpinned by the CSP’s desire to run data-focused businesses, including digital key performance indicators (KPIs).
Indoor location application platforms allow clients to develop business processes and applications that can leverage asset tracking, people tracking, occupancy monitoring and wayfinding. The market consists of vendors that ingest location information from IoT and other devices, process that information, provide analytics of location information, and provide APIs and software development kits (SDKs) to enable business applications to leverage location data.
Gartner defines the indoor location service market as “the hardware, software and service components that provide indoor location coordinates and services.” Indoor location solutions use differing hardware components, data collection methodologies, location data elements, location engine algorithms and architectures to achieve the core functionality of the indoor location market. Solutions provide the location of a static/mobile asset or person, as defined by the needs of the specific vertical market.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components wherever they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, or IaaS or PaaS in the cloud). This enables I&O teams to monitor the availability and resource utilization data of physical, virtual, software entities, and AI systems — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, storage, and basic application monitoring. These tools collect data in near real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.
Many IT infrastructure and operations leaders want to make their infrastructure services more agile and accessible via self-service. At the same time, they want a simplified, less complex implementation experience for hardware and software. As a result, I&O leaders often acquire infrastructure-centric CMPs with integrated infrastructure systems. IISs offer pre-integrated compute, storage and networking in combination with management software that typically includes IIS configuration management and monitoring. This same pattern extends to hyperconverged integrated systems (HCISs), which have a scale-out design based on commodity components to both reduce the initial acquisition price and enable pay-as-you-grow pricing, but may not offer networking capabilities in the solution.
Integrated systems combine server, shared storage and network devices, along with management software and support in a preintegrated stack. The integrated system market has four segments: integrated infrastructure system, integrated reference architecture, integrated stack system and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) segment. The overall HCI segment is further subdivided into Hyperconverged Integrated Systems (HCIS), which provides both software and hardware in an appliance model and the software only segment in which vendors provide the Hyperconverged software. This is then integrated with HW by a reseller or the end customer.
Internet of Things (IoT) services represents a set of end-to-end services in which businesses contract with external providers to design, build, install and operate IoT solutions, including advisory consulting for IoT planning. IoT service providers represent a range of small, midsize and large service firms that build and deploy IoT solution applications across industries. The focus of this market is on the medium and large service providers supporting key vertical markets for IoT adoption such as manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and retail. This market's IoT service focus aligns with the design, build and install of an IoT solution and includes IoT planning services for an IoT-enabled digital business environment.
Marketing refers to the products and services that enable organizations to plan, execute, measure, and optimize strategies for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers across digital and physical channels. This category includes markets that support content creation, campaign management, data-driven personalization, performance analytics and brand strategy—empowering businesses to deliver targeted, measurable, and customer-centric marketing experiences.
Gartner defines network access control (NAC) as technologies that enable organizations to implement policies for controlling access to corporate infrastructure by both user-oriented devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Policies may be based on authentication, endpoint configuration (posture) or users' role/identity. NAC can also implement postconnect policies based on integration with other security products. For example, NAC could enforce a policy to contain the endpoint based on an alert from a SIEM. An organization should evaluate the following capabilities: • Device visibility/profiling • Access control • Security posture check • Guest management • Bidirectional integration with other security products.
Gartner defines network automation platforms as systems that automate and orchestrate the configuration, deployment, and operational management of network infrastructure. Network automation platforms are delivered via software and interact directly with network devices, network controllers (or fabric managers), network services, network management systems, and other automation tools.
Network management tools are software applications used to monitor, maintain, and administer computer networks. They help in ensuring the network's efficient operation, detecting and resolving problems, and optimizing performance. Key functions include monitoring network traffic, managing network devices, ensuring security, and troubleshooting issues. Network Administrators, IT Managers, and Security Professionals utilize these tools to monitor and manage network hardware effectively. They track the performance of network devices such as routers and switches, ensuring these devices operate optimally. Additionally, they maintain and update the configuration of these network components to ensure robust security and efficient network functionality.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. They do this by ingesting telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. Observability platforms enable analysis of the ingested telemetry, either via human operator or machine intelligence, to determine changes in system behavior that impact end-user experience, such as outages or performance degradation. This allows early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability platforms are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers and product owners. Modern businesses rely heavily on critical digital applications and services, which are revenue-generating, client-facing and important to the efficient operation of the business. Outages, performance degradation and unreliability directly impact top-line revenue, client sentiment and brand perception. Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.
An operational support system (OSS) is a set of programs that help a company in monitoring, controlling, analyzing and managing a computer network. OSS software is specifically dedicated to communications service providers and mainly used for supporting network planning, network provisioning, service fulfillment, and service assurance from a common core of service and resource management. Other functionality includes embedded analytics, correlation and aggregation, reporting, product life cycle management, multichannel support, resource and asset planning. OSS data is of strategic importance to measure the impact of operational technical processes on customer and business goals.
Platform-native consumption services (PNCS) are multidomain, consumption-based, as-a-service offerings for enterprise mission-critical infrastructure. PNCS vendors’ platform and product capabilities provide API-centric control planes for SLA-based IT operations life cycle management and support. PNCS offerings include storage as a service (STaaS), compute as a service (CaaS), network as a service (NaaS), and data protection service offerings, including backup, archive and ransomware detection. PNCS vendors use artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) infrastructure telemetry, software and automation tools to provide proactive SLA management. IT outcomes include improved productivity, cyber-resilience and continuous workload infrastructure cost optimization. PNCS provides a hybrid IT operations platform approach to on-premises consumption-based as-a-service offerings in lieu of centralizing mission-critical infrastructure on the public cloud. PNCS vendors provide as-a-service offerings such as STaaS, CaaS and NaaS to enable IT operations to shift from capital expenditure (capex) to consumption for the benefits of an on-premises hybrid platform operating model. Major benefits that PNCS solutions provide include asset cost optimization, productivity improvement, sustainability and cyber-resilience SLAs that substantially improve IT operations. As a result, customers enjoy a more flexible usage model that meets business and IT operations demands. Other benefits include asset financing and management capabilities that favorably alter the economics of asset utilization. Use case examples include STaaS, CaaS, NaaS, data protection as a service such as ransomware protection or recovery, and higher levels of platform as a service (PaaS) services such as database as a service (DBaaS).
The primary storage platform (PSP) market addresses the need of I&O leaders to operate and support standardized enterprise storage products, along with platform-native service capabilities to support structured data applications. PSP products like primary enterprise storage arrays provide mandatory and common enterprise-class primary storage features and capabilities needed to support the platform. Platform-native services like storage as a service (STaaS) and ransomware protection, with PSP product capabilities, are required to support platform-native services. The PSP market has emerged at the convergence of two major enterprise storage market developments: the evolution of the PSP product market in conjunction with the demand for hybrid, multidomain platform-native storage services, extending on-premises services to public cloud, edge and colocation environments.
Secure access service edge (SASE) platforms deliver converged network and security-as-a-service capabilities, such as software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and secure access to the web, cloud services and private applications regardless of the user’s location, the device used or where that application is hosted. These offerings primarily use a cloud-centric architecture delivered as a platform by one vendor. SASE securely connects users and devices with applications, services and other users. It supports branch office and remote worker connectivity and on-premises general internet security, private application access and public cloud service provider access use cases.
Gartner defines software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as products used to connect branch locations to other enterprise and cloud locations. SD-WAN products provide dynamic path selection based on business or application policy, routing, centralized orchestration of policy and management of appliances, virtual private network (VPN) and zero-touch configuration. SD-WAN products are WAN transport/carrier-agnostic and create secure paths across physical WAN connections.
Gartner defines security service edge (SSE) as an offering that secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications regardless of the location of the user, the device they are using or where that application is hosted. SSE protects users from malicious and inappropriate content on the web and provides enhanced security and visibility for the SaaS and private applications accessed by end users. Security service edge provides a primarily cloud-delivered solution to control access from end users and devices to applications, as well as websites and the internet. It provides a range of security capabilities, including adaptive access based on identity and context, malware protection, data security and threat prevention, as well as the associated analytics and visibility. It enables more direct connectivity for hybrid users by reducing latency and providing the potential for improved user experience. Capabilities that are integrated across multiple traffic types and destinations allow a more seamless experience for both users and administrators while maintaining a consistent security stance.
Server virtualization includes a range of technologies that abstract an underlying infrastructure layer (networking, storage and compute [including memory]). In doing so, it improves hardware utilization, workload portability, automation and availability. Server virtualization is most often associated with hypervisor-based server workloads running in data center environments on industry-standard servers. In reality, server virtualization incorporates multiple technologies, spans locations from public cloud to edge, and supports initiatives for both cloud-native transformation and infrastructure modernization. It includes hardware-, cloud- and software-based technologies.
Gartner defines WAN optimization tools as products that improve the performance of applications running across the WAN as well as reduce WAN service expenses. WAN optimization solutions continue to evolve, and now support four high-level needs: improving the response times for users of business-critical applications over WAN links or mobile connections; assisting in maximizing ROI for WAN bandwidth; optimizing data-center-to-data-center (DC-to-DC) traffic for faster storage replication and synchronization; and assisting in directing traffic across multiple WANS, such as a hybrid WAN or public cloud connectivity.