TNO069: Network to Code Gets Enterprise Open-Core Right with Nautobot (Sponsored)
Network to Code discusses their evolution from a services-driven open-source company to an open-core business model with commercial software offerings, while maintaining their commitment to community. The company emphasizes practical, trust-based approaches to implementing AI and agentic automation within their Nautobot platform, focusing on governance, data quality, and deterministic outcomes.
Summary
Network to Code founders Jason Edelman (CTO) and Jeff Bradbury (VP of Marketing) discuss the company's strategic pivot from purely open-source and services-based business model to a hybrid open-core approach. The company, founded in 2014, has spent over a decade learning from enterprise customers through large-scale professional services projects, which informed the development of their Nautobot platform launched in 2021.
The company maintains clear principles about what remains open-source versus commercial: the open-source core (the "engine") continues to evolve independently and powers all commercial offerings, while new commercial software focuses on turnkey, pre-built automation solutions for specific customer outcomes. All existing open-source projects remain open-source, and the core platform components necessary to support future development remain freely available to the community.
The Nautobot 3.1 release, launched in April, introduced commercial packages (Professional and Enterprise editions) alongside the free community edition. The transition was motivated by customer feedback indicating that fixed, predictable software costs provide better financial planning than variable services-based pricing models. The release has generated positive reception, with enterprises appreciating the ability to capitalize software costs and the clarity of what they're purchasing.
Regarding AI integration, the company takes a measured, trust-focused approach. They've already released Nautobot GPT (assistive AI layer) and are progressing toward more advanced agentic capabilities while maintaining safety guardrails. Rather than pursuing autonomous operations, they emphasize AI as a tool that recommends actions while deterministic jobs and scripts execute the actual changes. Critical governance concepts include authentication/authorization per agent, comprehensive logging, time-of-day restrictions, idempotency verification, and geographic constraints.
The company frames their AI strategy around the progression from assistive AI to analysis to operations, with the ultimate goal of trustworthy autonomous capability. They stress that data quality is foundational—AI requires clean, trusted data to function effectively. Compliance and traceability are non-negotiable, requiring audit trails and human-in-the-loop capabilities where appropriate.
Nautobot 3.2 priorities include UX improvements, real-time search, and enterprise governance features. A particular focus is enhanced reporting capabilities with audit-ready reports for different personas (engineers, leaders, auditors) and a report engine allowing customization. The release also includes orchestrated automation capabilities enabling job chaining.
The company emphasizes pragmatism and grounding their approach in customer reality rather than hype. Both leaders stress the importance of staying practical, understanding what can actually be deployed in production with confidence, and taking phased approaches to adoption that match real customer capabilities.
About this episode
Network to Code’s Jason Edelman, Founder and CTO; and Jeff Bradbury, VP of Marketing of Network, join host Scott Robohn for this sponsored episode to discuss open-core done right — community first, and creating a path to scalable automation results for enterprise success. They update Scott on Nautobot 3.1, which includes AI and AI agents<a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://packetpushers.net/podcasts/total-network-operations/tno069-network-to-code-gets-enterprise-open-core-right-with-nautobot-sponsored/" title="ReadTNO069: Network to Code Gets Enterprise Open-Core Right with Nautobot (Sponsored)">... Read more »</a>
Key Insights
- Network to Code built their commercial software strategy on a decade of learnings from large enterprise professional services engagements, essentially productizing bespoke solutions they had repeatedly built for customers.
- The company explicitly designed their Venn diagram model so open-source powers everything underneath, with commercial software sitting on top—all future core platform functionality and data models continue as open-source to benefit the entire community.
- Enterprise customers expressed strong preference for fixed, predictable software licensing over variable services-based pricing because it enables consistent budgeting, CapEx/OpEx classification, and annual financial planning.
- Network to Code positions their AI strategy as progressing through four distinct layers: assistive AI (co-pilot), analysis (data quality validation), operations (planning and executing deterministic jobs), and eventual autonomous capability—rather than jumping directly to autonomous agents.
- The company argues that trust in agentic AI requires treating it like enterprise platform governance, implementing AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting), idempotency verification, time-of-day restrictions, geographic constraints, and human-in-the-loop controls rather than relying solely on LLM safety features.
- Nautobot serves as a governance and trust layer that restricts which automation jobs agents are permitted to execute, creating an 'agentic catalog' separate from the full job inventory to control risk exposure.
- Network to Code's 3.1 release strategy involved integrating multiple applications to deliver broader customer outcomes—for example, combining device discovery with device onboarding in Professional Edition, and OS upgrade with operational compliance in Enterprise Edition.
- The founders argue that if companies don't make revenue from open-source projects, those projects may not exist in the future, framing their commercial shift as necessary to ensure continued investment in the platform and community benefits.
Topics
Transcript
. Welcome to Total Network Operations, the podcast for all of you in the business of delivering all the packets. Our mission is simple, we want to bring out great ideas in network operations, network engineering, network architecture, and the whole ecosystem. I am your friendly neighborhood podcast host, Scott Robon. Today, I'd like to welcome for the sponsored episode from Network to Code, Jason Edelman and Jeff Bradbury. Gentlemen, welcome to the show today. Thanks for having us. Great to be here, Scott. Great to have you. So today, we're going to talk about OpenCore and doing OpenCore right. What it means to have this mix of serving community and creating a path to commercial automation outcomes for customers…
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