From Source of Truth to Infrastructure Intelligence

Hey everyone, welcome back to Techstrong TV. I'm really happy to have our next guest on, introduce you to him. His name is Chris Beavers.

Chris is the CEO and one of the co-founders for NetBox Labs. Chris, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you on here.

Yeah, thank you, Shimey. Really excited to be here. All righty.

So Chris, let's start with you. " Tell us your Chris Beavers story. Yeah, I really appreciate that question.

" But you have that in the back of your head. And it eventually comes true. And so I've actually started quite a few companies.

This is my fifth, maybe, company. And for me, as far back as first dotcom boom is when I got started with startups. Mm-hmm.

And, what I particularly fell in love with, we don't need to worry about what those companies were, is the underlying technology, what I think of as the infrastructure of building these big scalable systems that serve millions of users in real-time over the internet or whatever it is. Most recently, before NetBox Labs, I was the founder and CEO at a company called NS1, and NS1 was internet infrastructure. We were doing DNS and traffic steering for tons of traffic all over the internet and optimizing performance and reliability, through a real scale-up time on the internet, the 2010s roughly.

And what that proved to me was the importance of the network. And we can skip a bunch of steps, but maybe the headline, is that the outcome of that business was it found us this thing called NetBox, and we'll dig into what that is a little, I think. But yeah, it's one of the things I've learned in building these businesses over time is that you learn in the act of building one about the problem that you want to solve next.

And so here we are. Absolutely. It's funny.

Excuse me. I sold my first company into the dotcom too. Yeah.

Back in '97. And- Long time ... then I helped the company I sold it to.

We were doing a roll-up in hosting and infrastructure. We did 30 acquisitions in 36 months. Crazy, like one a month.

Did that whole ride up, IPO'd in the dotcom, and the whole ride down, unfortunately. Done a few more startups since then. So like you, I've been doing them a long time, Chris.

I thought I was done with them. Well, yeah. And I started just writing and speaking in 2010 or so.

Yeah. And Techstrong grew out of that. It was my best startup, my best venture ever, because I didn't raise money for it or anything.

But here we are. And you're right. You learn.

My grandma used to tell me about grandchildren. She had no favorites. Each one was special.

It's the same thing with your companies. Each one is its own unique learning experience, its own unique passion, if you will. Tell us the NetBox story.

Yeah. Well, to your point, this is definitely a unique business in a lot of interesting ways. And let me start by just touching on what NetBox and NetBox Labs are.

So NetBox is the system of record for infrastructure. It's been around about a decade, actually turned 10 this month. And NetBox, I didn't build it.

I encountered it. And the reason is that the core product, NetBox, is open source software. It was built 10 years ago, open sourced by the team that built it, and I encountered it.

I mentioned, I was running, prior to this, this company, NS1, and we were building network infrastructure technology. And I remember in probably about 2020 or so, just before, and during COVID, working with these enterprise networking teams that are customers and hearing over and over and over again, "We like your technology. " And that really caught my attention.

And so as we dug into it, what we found was this widely used piece of open source software that these teams were leveraging to manage their networks, manage their infrastructure footprints. It is the place that teams write down what should be true in their infrastructure. All of the servers and switches and cables and power and IP addresses and VRFs and VLANs and all kinds of other acronyms.

It all gets represented in this data system, this system of record. And then off of that, all of the problems that these teams are solving in evolving that infrastructure and understanding it and designing new infrastructures, all hang from that data. That was really, really interesting to me.

And so just skipping a few steps today, NetBox Labs, we are what we call the commercial stewards of NetBox. So, we are the company that builds NetBox, the open source project. We manage and maintain that, and then we of course, deliver commercial products around NetBox, that help these teams manage their infrastructure more effectively.

I love it. So I'm familiar with that model, right? My friend Marty Roesch, actually is how you pronounce it.

Marty, of course, was the inventor- I do know Marty, yeah ... of Snort, right? That's right.

And then Sourcefire was built around Snort. Brad Ghouler at Tenable, right? They took Nessus and built it out around...

Though they took it out of open source eventually. It's a model that works. It's a model that's succeeded, and I get it.

And some of, eventually a lot of people, it's the open core model, where- Mm-hmm ... the underlying core is open, and then you're adding freemium, premium modules on top of it, right? So it's a well-understood model and makes sense.

Ten years in, that's a lot of time to be putting into this, right? Give us a sense of NetBox adoption, like its market share, its voice, if you will, of market. Yeah.

It's a great question. So first, you're right. It's open core business.

And I think, we're the beneficiaries of couple decades of open source business models being hashed out- We've all been ... by companies like you mentioned, right, or Red Hat- Mm-hmm ... or Mongo, Grafana, right?

Sure. And I think we have been able to go really, really fast as a result of learning from what has come before and the success of other open source businesses and what's worked by them. Today, to give you a sense, and this is what attracted me to NetBox, NetBox is pervasive in infrastructure.

This is what I was feeling at NS1 when we first encountered NetBox. Tens, hundreds of thousands of deployments of NetBox worldwide. If you are running IT infrastructure, if you have a data center or an enterprise network or an OT footprint or service provider network or something like that, almost certainly NetBox is deployed in that environment.

Other measures that you might find interesting, sometimes in open source, we think in terms of GitHub stars, right? 20,000 something GitHub stars. Companies like Arm or Cisco, CoreWeave, JP Morgan, Kaiser, all of these are running their infrastructure on NetBox.

Some commercially and some using the open source. And so, we're always investing in both the open source and the commercial editions, and that adoption continues to grow in both dimensions. Love it.

Chris, if it's okay, I want to pivot over. You guys made some big announcements on June 11th, so last week or so. Yeah, that's right.

Can you give us the short version, even if you'd like, or the long version? Yeah, I can always give the long version, but let's stick with the short version today. So, maybe the biggest headline is last week we announced our evolution into an infrastructure intelligence platform.

And the headline here is NetBox is the source of truth for these organizations, right? It is where they write down what the design of the infrastructure is, how it should be operating, the relationships between elements of that infrastructure, and that's worked really well and driven that adoption that we just talked about over the course of the last decade. But the problems these teams have to solve now are much more vast.

The infrastructure's getting a lot more complicated. It's changing at a much higher rate because of just the move to everything is connected software or SaaS or just here we are talking to each other over the internet, and AI obviously. So that rate of change, the complexities is increasing, the criticality is increasing, but they've got to solve problems of operations and observability and automation and security and AIOps around that dataset.

And that's what we announced last week is a platform that addresses a large array of those problems for customers. And then just to go a little deeper for you, we specifically announced last week tools for connecting the context of NetBox and all of the intelligence encoded in it to agents, make it easier for these teams to adopt agents to automate away a lot of the grunt work of managing their infrastructure. But we announced products for safety in agentic operations.

You think about infrastructure, this is super critical. This isn't like writing code that you're going to run on your laptop. This is the networks and the data centers that run the world that we are in, and you're not going to unleash agents on this without guardrails and policy and compliance proof that what the agents are proposing is good and correct.

Then we also announced something we call the NetBox Data Exchange, which is really raw infrastructure intelligence. We brought metadata about just about every infrastructure component that's ever existed that we learn about because of our position in the ecosystem to bear so our customers can understand their footprints, understand the life cycle characteristics of the components and their footprints, the physical characteristics of those things. They can plan change, design new infrastructures using that data.

So just a lot that we announced last week. I love it. I want to focus in, Chris, if it's okay, on NetBox Data Exchange, so NDX.

Sure. Can we go a little deeper there? Yeah.

Let's explore the problem space here. So NetBox spans the entire life cycle of infrastructure operations. Another thing we announced last week that I didn't get to is asset life cycle management.

So as early as I've got a design for a new data center, or I've got a design for a new branch network or something like that, where does that design live? You need to represent it somewhere. It shouldn't live in an Excel sheet.

That's probably not going to result in an effective build process for some complicated infrastructure. Generally, it lives in NetBox, and so even as early as design iteration, like should I use this switch or this switch? Should I use this cable or this cable?

Or should I use this optic or this optic? That design iteration needs to be driven by data, and information about those components that are going to make up a working, scaled infrastructure. So NetBox data exchange is that, right?

We have the logical, life cycle, physical, observability, and other characteristics about something on the order of 16,000, 17,000 different infrastructure components over roughly a 30-something-year history from, I think it's about 115, 116 different vendors that we curate for our customers so that they can use that data in driving design of infrastructure and understanding things like the life cycle characteristics of their infrastructure. How many of my switches in my core data center are end-of-lifing in the next two years? So you can do budgeting and replanning and forecasting, that kind of thing.

Other characteristics that are really interesting in the AI age, like power draw or thermal characteristics, say, of a GPU server. How much heat is this thing going to throw off? How much cooling capacity do I need to put in my data center?

We can ask and answer those kinds of questions. Then the last thing I want to say about NDX is that it is open. Anyone can go to it.

com/ndx, and you can browse this catalog, you can download, if you're a NetBox user, on an open source basis, the device types and so on, and ingest some of this data into your footprint for these use cases. And this is one of the ways that we invest in our community and ecosystem. I love it.

And you said it's open. We were talking before about open core. When you say it's open, are there premium kind of features involved there too, though?

Yeah. Appreciate you asking that. So, the way we think about NDX is that there are baseline use cases that we make accessible to everybody.

Now, there's some data that is extremely rich that is most useful for professional operators of that scale infrastructure. And a good example of this that we just touched on is some of those thermal characteristics, for example. Right?

And so some of that, what we call enrichment data, is available to NetBox Cloud customers or NetBox Enterprise customers. But then we want to make sure that the baseline data, like what is this device, what's its serial number, how many ports does it have, what port speeds are they? That information is available to the community.

So yes, it's an open core model. All right. Chris, we're almost out of time, but I realize we spoke about a lot of things but didn't give people sort of where to go right?

Yeah. How can they find out more about NetBox Labs? I know you did quickly mention the URL for NDX.

Yeah. But I don't know if people had their pens handy. Can you just go over some of those again?

Of course. I appreciate that, Shimi. So first headline, you just Google NetBox and you will find us, right?

NetBox is incredibly pervasive in the world and in the ecosystem. com, it's all there, right? So what we haven't explored today really in depth is our overall infrastructure intelligence platform and all the products and capabilities there.

You can go there, you can read about that stuff, all the docs, all the open source stuff, tons of resources from the community, and for the community all there, right? com is the place to be. What about, so we have a geeky audience, Chris.

Yeah. If they're on GitHub, can they get- Of course ... to NetBox?

Yes. We're all over GitHub. And again, you search for NetBox, that's probably the second result that'll pop up is the open source repo for NetBox.

There's, I think, on the order of tens of thousands of discussions that are happening there all the time. Reddit is another place you can go. There's just a lot of chatter.

We also have a Slack community, I think I'm looking at it right now. It's like on the order of 11,000, 12,000 people talking about NetBox all the time, right? So, we welcome that.

We're all over the place, right? And we want to talk to our community, so, that's great. So Chris, there's no shortage of places, right?

As you mentioned, GitHub and the website and so forth. But you guys have an event or something coming up soon too, don't you? I appreciate you asking that, Shimi.

Yeah. I'm really excited about this. First time ever, we are hosting a NetBox conference called NetBox Evolve.

It's going to be in October, actually, at the coolest venue ever, which is the Kennedy Space Center, just for our community, our customers, our partners, where I'm sure we're going to have a million announcements and really dig into use cases and the work that's being done in the community and so on. com. That conference in, I think it's October, second week of October, in Florida.

Have you ever been at that Kennedy Space Center? I was just there a few months ago, actually. I love it.

And what a fun time, to be at the Kennedy Space Center right now. Absolutely. I live in South Florida, so when my kids were younger, we used to go up there on the way sometimes or on the way home from Disney and/or Universal.

I used to love it more than they did. We'd do lunch with the astronauts and everything. I was like a little kid.

What a great venue for an event. That's... Yeah, want to- I may have to hit you up for a media pass for that one, Chris.

I was going to say, come on over, Shimi. Yep. We'll have a good time.

All righty. Hey, so that's in October, second week in October. You got it.

Second week in October. And what's it called? NetBox Evolve, or?

NetBox Evolve. Yep. com, so yep.

Hey Chris, man, thanks for coming up here on Techstrong TV. I hope this won't be the last time you're here. Right?

Anytime, Shimi. Come back, keep us posted. Yeah, anytime.

All right, man. Super fun. Yeah, really appreciate it.

Take care. All right. Chris Beaver, CEO, co-founder, NetBox Labs.

As he said, they're all over. Go check them out. We're going to take a break.

We'll be back on Techstrong TV soon.