NetBox Labs, Presidio Join Forces To Accelerate Enterprise Network Automation, AI Projects

NetBox Labs continues to grow its channel strategy with Presidio, targeting enterprise network modernization, automation and AI-driven infrastructure projects.

NetBox Labs, the three-year-old commercial steward of open-source network and infrastructure management stack NetBox, has formalized a partnership with solution provider giant Presidio.

The collaboration combines Presidio’s expertise in strategic consulting with Netbox’s technology to help enterprises modernize their networks with automation and AI integration, the two companies told CRN.

“The biggest [modernization] projects, the most important projects, [and] the most expansive projects all have a partner like Presidio involved. They’re instrumental in helping our customers understand why they need our technology and why it’s so foundational to the types of strategic projects that the customers are trying to achieve,” said Bill Lapcevic, co-founder and chief revenue officer for NetBox Labs (pictured above).

Founded in 2023 after it spun out of DNS platform provider NS1, NetBox Labs offers what the company calls “the world’s most popular ecosystem for operating, automating and securing networks and infrastructure.” Via the relationship between the two companies that’s been in the works for two years, NetBox’s platform has become a core component of Presidio’s Modern Networks practice aimed at global enterprises across industries such as financial services, healthcare, and entertainment.

Networks are operating at much larger scale than they ever have before with countless devices and in some cases, the introduction of cloud networking. As a result, “manual” network operations aren’t practically feasible anymore for many large enterprises, said Brian Wisler, vice president of Modern Networks at Presidio.

“A lot of our large enterprise customers are rapidly adopting … infrastructure as code. The progression for those customers is, first, we need to know what do you have, what’s the consistency of that device, [and] what should it be? NetBox is the de facto standard [and] instrumental for those customers on that journey. We have a lot of really large enterprises that are kind of just beginning to develop maturity in that space, so we’ve been partnering with NetBox on a lot of those customers,” Wisler said.

The partnership has already borne fruit in the form of engagements with one of North America’s largest banks and a major U.S. metropolitan court system, among others, that are working on automation projects, Lapcevic said.

Part of NetBox’s channel strategy has been to partner with more solution provider leaders. NetBox earlier this year announced a strategic relationship with World Wide Technology (WWT), followed by a partnership with Chicago-based solution provider giant Ahead.

Lapcevic said that NetBox is working toward generating 40 percent of the company’s growth through partners over the next year. Many of the company’s largest transactions are coming from partners, he added.

The relationship with Presidio is important because the solution provider leader is known for its ability to execute on large-scale business transformation projects throughout North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, NetBox said.

“NetBox Labs has no services. We rely on partners like Presidio to deliver this strategic level of organizational behavior change and network infrastructure modernization, and all the technology consulting that goes with it,” Lapcevic said.

That’s especially important in the agentic AI world, he added.

“Big enterprises are now trying to figure out: How do I properly adopt AI to speed the modernization of my infrastructure? And then feed the AI ops practices that they’re building. This is another place that I think Presidio really provides a level of expertise that takes the NetBox Labs technology to the next level and really makes it absolutely critical for these big enterprises,” Lapcevic said.

Presidio has more than 6,800 global customers.