The network infrastructure and operations industry is on fire. How do I know? Just look at how busy the Network Infrastructure and Operations practice at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) was in 2025.

In addition to several custom research projects conducted for clients, I published eight independent research reports for EMA’s Network Infrastructure and Operations practice. Vendors provide financial support for these independent reports, but they have no editorial control over the research. Their support is motivated by a need to understand their customers and a need for independent research that validates their messaging.

In a typical year I publish four or five reports. My 2025 research output was the highest of my 11 years as a networking industry analyst, which tells me that the market is experiencing a period of intense innovation and competition.

What follows is an overview of my 2025 research. All this research is free to EMA subscribers. If you are not a subscriber, consider becoming one!  The insights in these eight reports will give you a good overview of the dynamics that are driving this industry today. It will also help you as a network engineer to prepare for the future.

Network Observability Tool Strategy

In January 2025, I published “Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks,” a deep examination the tools that enterprise IT organizations use to monitor and troubleshoot their networks. This report is based on a survey of 351 IT professionals.

Key findings;

• Only 43% of network teams are completely successful with these tools
• Tool strategies are challenged by limited scope, high costs, lack of customization, difficulty with deployment and administration
• 87% are using multiple tools to monitor and troubleshoot networks, pointing to a lack of unified tooling
• Most enterprises are collecting increased volumes of data with their tools as network complexity and scale expand
• 59% believe they will replace some of these tools over the next couple years

The full report is an in-depth examination of all aspects of network observability. A network tool architect at a Fortune 500 retailer told me that reading a previous version of this report helped him prepare for the job interview that earned him his current role.

Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Network Architecture

In April 2025, I published “Enterprise Strategies for Hybrid, Multi-cloud Networks,” based on a survey of 354 IT professionals that have a hybrid, multi-cloud networks. This research explored how enterprises build, manage, and secure these hybrid, multi-cloud networks.

The key findings of this research include:

• Only 25% of enterprises have been completely successful with hybrid, multi-cloud networking
• Only 37% of network teams believe they are completely effective at collaborating with cloud teams
• Most enterprises rely heavily on networking solutions that their cloud providers offer natively (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, DNS services, routers)
• At the same time, most organizations want to unify and centralize management of nearly all aspects of networking across their cloud providers and data centers, something that is extremely difficult to achieve when using the siloed networking features offered by those cloud providers

Check out the report to get more details about the above, as well as how network teams are handling observability and security for these networks.

Investigating the Persistence of Homegrown Network Automation

In June 2025, we published “From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help.” This report is based long, one-on-one interviews with a dozen network automation engineers who are building and maintaining homegrown and open source network automation tools.

The goal of this research was to understand why so many network engineering teams use homegrown tools rather than vendors' products. The research investigates both the benefits and the challenges of such an approach. I also asked engineers to share how they’d like network automation vendors to help them. Most are unwilling to abandon the homegrown automation they have, but they would welcome a vendor that could enhance what they are doing.

The key findings of this research were:

• Homegrown network automation is driven by:
  • Cost and budget constraints
  • A need for customizability and control over tool roadmaps
  • A recognition that open source tools are industry standards
  • Homegrown tools can often evolve with the needs of a business
• Homegrown network automation challenges include:
  • Shortages of engineers with a combination of networking and coding skills
  • Projects bogged down by tool complexity
  • Ease of use issues for consumers of network automation
  • Technical debt driven by the need to maintain and support homegrown tools
  • Security risk

Check out the report to learn how engineers want vendors to enhance what they are doing.

Is Your Network Ready for AI Traffic?

In June 2025, we published “Readying Enterprise Networks For Artificial Intelligence,” based on a survey of 269 IT professionals who were actively engaged with preparing their networks to support AI applications. This research looked at how IT organizations optimize their data center networks for AI workloads and prepare wide-area networks (WAN) for AI traffic. It also asked IT professionals to identify new network observability and security requirements.

Key findings of this research include:

• Security risk, budget, and keeping up with the pace of AI innovation are the top business challenges to preparing networks for AI
• Only 49% of companies that are engaged with AI projects believe their data center networks are completely capable of supporting AI workloads today
• Only 48% believe their WANs are completely capable for supporting AI traffic today
• Only 487% believe their network observability tools are completely prepared to manage these AI networks

The full report dives into all of the above in detail. It also explores where AI workloads are being deployed and why, what kinds of traffic patterns AI is generating on networks, and what security measures network teams are adopting to protect AI assets.

The Criticality of Cloud Traffic Data to NetOps and SecOps

In August 2025, we published “Cloud Network Traffic Data: Empowering Network and Security Operations in the Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Era.” Based on a survey of 250 IT professionals, this research explores how network and security teams use cloud network traffic data (e.g., packets and flow data) to enhance hybrid, multi-cloud networking and security.

Key findings from this research include:

• 80% of IT professionals believe it is very important to have a consistent and unified approach to collecting network packet data across cloud providers and on-premises networks
• 62% believe it is very important for traditional network monitoring tools to collect and analyze VPC flow logs that cloud providers offer
• Effective approaches to accessing and analyzing cloud network traffic correlates strongly with:
  • Faster resolutions of network performance problems
  • Faster and more efficient security investigations
• Packet data collected from public cloud environments is especially valuable for
  • Security incident investigations (83%)
  • Security incident detections (80%)
  • Performance monitoring (79%)
  • Application and network troubleshooting (74%

The full report provides details about how organizations are collecting and analyzing this cloud traffic data. it also explores the challenges these organizations encounter when working with this data.

Examining the DDI Market

In September 2025, we published the 2025 EMA^TM Radar for DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI). This report serves as a buyers’ guide for DDI solutions. It evaluates and compares 12 solutions from 10 vendors.

The vendors evaluated in this study include BlueCat Networks, Cygna Labs, EfficientIP, FusionLayer, Infoblox, IPv4.Global (formerly 6Connect), ManageEngine, NetBox Labs, SolarWinds, and TCPWave.

Examining the Wi-Fi 7 Adoption Wave

In October 2025, we published “Enterprises Embrace AI-Dirven Wi-Fi to Meet Today’s Network Demands.” This report surveyed 152 enterprise Wi-Fi experts about their current wireless networking strategies.

Key findings of this report include:

• 59% of IT organizations planned to initiate a Wi-Fi upgrade within 12 months
• Only 7% of companies describe Wi-Fi 7 as the predominant generation of Wi-Fi technology in their networks, meaning this upcoming adoption wave will see many companies making the leap from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7.
• The top challenges to Wi-Fi operations today are Increased user expectations and security risk
• Bandwidth demand for Wi-Fi has increased for 99% of companies over the last three years
• 49% of IT pros say AI-driven network management capabilities drive their Wi-Fi vendor selection and 99% have interest in AI-driven network management in general

The full report dives deep into best practices for Wi-Fi operations and it explores how and why requirements for wireless networks are changing.

The Rise of Network Sources of Truth

In December 2025, I published “The Network Source of Truth: How Engineering Teams Establish and Use These Critical Tools.” This research is based on one-on-one interviews with 17 network engineering pros who are engaged with a network source of truth (NSoT) project or solution. This research defined an NSoT as a system or repository that stores, models, and provides programmatic access to network intent data.

Key findings of this research include:

• NSoT adoption occurs when IT organizations:
  • Need to improve how networking personnel gather and use network data for day-to-day operations
  • Need to provide network automation tools with programmatic access to network intent data
• A good NSoT tool must have:
  • An extensible and robust data model
  • Integrated workflows and reporting across data that is traditionally siloed (IP address info, network inventory, connectivity info)
  • Platform security and multitenancy
  • APIs for customization and integration
  • Discovery functionality

The full report also explores exactly how today’s network engineering teams are establishing NSoTs, the challenges they encounter with these projects, and the innovation they want to see from NSoT tool providers.

This year will be just as busy for the Network Infrastructure and Operations practice. Check out EMA"s 2026 research calendar to see what I have planned. I'm also taking requests, so feel free to suggest a topic.