Summary
Kentik is excited to announce that we’ve entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Infoblox, marking the next chapter in our mission to revolutionize how networks are run. Read on for what this means for our customers, partners, and team.
A new chapter for Kentik
Today, I’m excited to share that Kentik has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Infoblox.
This is an important milestone for our company, our customers, our partners, and our team, as we begin the next phase of our mission together with Infoblox.
For more than a decade, we’ve been pursuing a simple but ambitious mission: to revolutionize how networks are run. As networks have grown larger, more distributed, and increasingly critical to every business, we’ve worked to give operators the intelligence they need to understand, manage, and ultimately run them more effectively.
Joining Infoblox is a major step toward that vision. By combining the Kentik Network Intelligence Platform with Infoblox’s leadership in authoritative DNS, IP address management, and critical network services, we have the opportunity to build something neither company could create alone: a unified operational foundation for the next generation of networking.
Looking back
When Justin, Ian P., Ian A., and I founded Kentik in early 2014, the networking world looked very different.
Public cloud was still in its early stages. Kubernetes didn’t exist. AI infrastructure wasn’t yet reshaping data centers. “Sneakernet” was no longer an option – but most enterprises still thought of their networks as things that connected offices and applications, not as the foundation for nearly every digital experience.
But one trend was already becoming clear.
Networks were evolving much faster than the tools used to operate them.
Traffic volumes were exploding. Hybrid infrastructure was emerging. The internet itself had become part of every enterprise network. Yet operators still spent enormous amounts of time trying to answer the same basic questions:
What’s happening?
Why is it happening?
Where is the problem?
What changed?
We believed the answers were already there, hidden in the telemetry generated by the network itself.
The appliances and Windows software people were using to handle telemetry just couldn’t answer the questions.
Flow data had existed for years, but it was dramatically underutilized. For many organizations, it was something collected for billing, sampled for security investigations, or occasionally consulted during difficult outages.
We believed it could become something much more valuable: a continuously updated understanding of how an entire network behaves.
That became Kentik’s founding thesis.
From visibility to network observability to intelligence
From the beginning, we weren’t trying to build another monitoring product.
We believed networking needed something fundamentally different.
Visibility is important, but visibility alone isn’t enough. Operators don’t wake up wanting more dashboards. They want answers.
Our goal was to transform enormous amounts of network telemetry into understanding. Not simply showing what happened, but helping explain why it happened, what changed, what matters most, and eventually what should happen next.
We called that vision “network observability” long before it became common industry language.
Over the years, that vision expanded far beyond flow telemetry.
We added cloud visibility, internet performance monitoring, synthetic testing, routing intelligence, DDoS detection, network monitoring, AI-assisted investigations, and increasingly sophisticated analytics. Every new capability served the same purpose: giving customers a more complete understanding of increasingly complex environments.
Along the way, we were fortunate to earn the trust of hundreds of organizations – from global enterprises and financial institutions to cloud providers, digital-native companies, and service providers operating some of the largest and most demanding networks in the world.
More recently, customers have been asking an even bigger question:
How do we manage infrastructure that’s becoming too large, too dynamic, and changing too quickly for humans alone to handle?
We built AI Advisor to coordinate and operate networking tasks for our customers, enabling them to not just manage those large, dynamic networks, but to do so more efficiently than ever.
Why now?
That question defines the next era of networking. Two powerful trends are converging.
First, AI is changing networking from both directions.
AI infrastructure is creating unprecedented demands on network scale, performance, reliability, and efficiency. At the same time, AI is beginning to change how operators work, helping investigate incidents, explain behavior, recommend actions, and automate increasingly routine operational tasks.
Second, networking and security are becoming inseparable. Organizations can no longer understand or protect infrastructure without understanding how traffic flows, how services depend on one another, and how every connected asset communicates.
The challenge is no longer collecting data.
It’s transforming data into trusted operational intelligence by enriching, correlating, and continually analyzing it.
AI systems are only as good as the context they’re given. To make good decisions, they need to understand not only traffic and performance, but also identity, DNS, addressing, topology, dependencies, and intent.
The next generation of networking won’t be built on isolated tools.
It will be built on massive volumes of telemetry, combined with rich operational context.
Why Infoblox?
That’s why joining Infoblox is so exciting.
As we got to know the Infoblox team, it became clear that we share a common view of where networking is headed.
We are also hearing it from our customers. Infoblox has 75% of the Fortune 500, and we already share over 80 customers with them. Our customers are asking about Infoblox integrations, and Infoblox’s customers have expressed interest in Kentik as well.
Infoblox has spent decades building the industry’s leading platform for authoritative DNS, IP address management, and critical network services. That gives organizations an authoritative understanding of what exists on their networks.
Kentik provides deep intelligence about what those networks are actually doing – how traffic flows, how applications perform, where dependencies exist, and how operators can respond faster when something changes.
These capabilities are profoundly complementary.
Network intelligence requires context.
You can’t fully understand traffic without understanding identity. You can’t understand dependencies without authoritative knowledge of DNS and network assets. And you can’t build trustworthy AI for network operations without both.
Together, we have the opportunity to combine network identity with real-time operational intelligence into a single AI-ready platform for modern networking.
That brings us significantly closer to the mission we’ve pursued since Kentik was founded: revolutionizing how networks are run.
What this means for customers
For our customers and partners, today’s announcement is primarily about opportunity.
Immediately, very little changes. Today, your contracts, pricing, account teams, and support experience remain the same.
We’ll continue building the Kentik platform and executing on our roadmap.
Long-term, we’re super excited about what we’ll be able to build together with Infoblox.
By combining Infoblox’s understanding of network identity with Kentik’s observability, analytics, and AI capabilities, we’ll deliver richer operational context, smarter automation, and more powerful workflows than either company could create independently.
Thank you
Kentik exists because customers believed in a new idea before it was obvious that networking needed observability. Because partners, investors, and advisors supported us throughout the journey. And because thousands of conversations with network operators pushed us to build something better. To all of you, thank you for your time, trust, and suggestions.
It also exists because of our extraordinary team – including many people who have spent more than a decade building this company.
To every Kentik employee, past and present: thank you. You’ve built remarkable technology, served customers through every challenge, and helped define what network intelligence can become.
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together.
The journey continues
Today marks the end of one chapter for Kentik.
It also marks the beginning of a much larger one.
The first decade of Kentik was about helping people understand their networks.
The next decade will be about helping networks increasingly understand and protect themselves and their companies.
That doesn’t mean replacing network engineers. It means giving them systems that can reason over enormous amounts of operational data, investigate issues, surface insights, recommend actions, and increasingly partner with them in operating some of the world’s most critical infrastructure.
We’ve always believed network intelligence was the destination.
Joining Infoblox gives us the opportunity to build it on an even larger scale.
Thanks again to all of our customers, employees, and friends for believing in and supporting us so far, and for joining us on the next phase of our journey.
