Infoblox 3.0 is a vision and a strategy, not a new product set, but it’s an important vision and strategy, which provides an integrated cloud-native management console for their on-prem and cloud products alike.

Today, network security and automation provider Infoblox is announcing its Infoblox 3.0 strategy. It provides a secure, cloud-first network experience by unifying its on-prem NIOS DDI solution and its cloud native BloxOne Threat Defense and DDI platforms into a single environment, managed from a single cloud-based pane of glass.

“Infoblox 3.0 isn’t so much a product but a vision, and our products support the vision,” said Anthony James, VP of Product Marketing at Infoblox. “We call this our third evolution of our solution set to the market. DNS was 1.0. DDI was 2.0. 3.0 is all about taking those core elements and moving them into a cloud-delivered model. It’s moving to a cloud-first strategy, although this does not mean we are renouncing our data-centre products.”

That broader integration of cloud capability is what differentiates 3.0 from Infoblox’s previous cloud offerings.

“The difference is that we have made an integration between our on-prem infrastructure and cloud-infrastructure solutions from a single cloud-based portal,” James said. “We have married both together to provide a single instance view – one single centralized view to understand where all assets live, through one console.”

Infoblox 3.0 enables both public and private clouds as well as on-prem, giving customers more choice.

“Enterprises that for regulatory or compliance reasons can’t adopt public clouds, now have the ability to get cloud capabilities even from on-prem,” James indicated.  “Our SaaS delivery model also brings public cloud back into the fold of DDI architecture.”

James said this integrated approach addresses fundamental customer concerns over a lack of visibility among assets in different clouds.

“We have done a lot of focus groups, and they have said visibility is their number one concern, especially when it embraces public clouds,” he noted. “Right now, visibility is fragmented. If you spin up a dozen records in AWS, you have to use AWS tools to know what they are. So you are bouncing between on-prem assets and into separate consoles. Our goal with 3.0 is to centralize and bring back that central visibility point of view.”

James said that Infoblox 3.0 will expand the company’s business with born-in-the-cloud and other cloud-centric customers.

“A customer who is born in the cloud, and uses multiple clouds can get back that visibility and control with our cloud-based platform,” he indicated. “It will let us address a market we haven’t worked with much in the past. We’ve been mainly data centre. Our 3.0 cloud-first strategy provides a tremendous path to cloud customers.”

Since Infoblox 3.0 is essentially a management integration of existing products, it does not disrupt those existing products, and there are no plans to stop selling them as separate offerings.

“We still see a lot of orgs that cannot adopt public clouds who still want a cloud, so they build their own private clouds,” James said. “Our traditional platforms can help those organizations embrace those models, so we still see a market for those traditional products.”

Infoblox has a hybrid Go-to-Market model, and James said 3.0’s cloud-first message will resonate with partners.

“We’ve always felt partners play a tremendous part of our Go-to-Market, and this will give them additional capabilities,” he said. “It will provide more for customers focused on public clouds, or on Nutanix or OpenShift. We will help partners here by giving them education, and spinning up a new API portal that will help them accelerate additional integrations with other partners. We feel strongly that our open API capabilities and embracing public and private clouds will give much broader professional services than deploying VDI on-prem.”

Just as Infoblox expects to see more interest from born-in-the-cloud customers as a result of 3.0, they similarly expect to see interest from cloud-centric channel partners they have not worked with in the past.

“We expect to see more of these born-in-the-cloud type of partners now,” James stated.