Infoblox Acquires Kentik to Build an AI-Ready Data Fabric for Hybrid Cloud Networks

Infoblox has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Kentik, the network intelligence and observability platform, in a deal that brings real-time traffic visibility together with authoritative DNS and network identity data at a moment when enterprises are handing greater operational responsibility to AI. The acquisition, announced on Thursday and subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions, positions the combined company to supply the continuous, high-fidelity data that agentic operations require to function with confidence across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

The transaction addresses a structural gap that has widened as AI systems assume more of the work of running enterprise networks. Organisations now contend with mounting complexity across networks, cloud environments, applications, AI workloads and digital services, and the intelligence available to human and machine operators alike has struggled to keep pace. With AI acting on operational data, the completeness and quality of that data has become a determinant of whether automated decisions can be trusted, and the combination of Infoblox’s identity context with Kentik’s traffic intelligence is intended to answer that requirement directly.

The Deal Consolidates Two Sources Of Network Truth Under One Operational Data Fabric

For more than two decades, Infoblox has served as the foundation on which enterprises secure their environments and manage the DNS, DHCP, IP address management and network identity services their businesses depend on. Kentik contributes the live operational view that has been absent from that picture, ingesting full-fidelity flow data, routing and path intelligence, cloud VPC logs, synthetic testing and device telemetry across data centres, cloud, wide area networks and the public internet. From that telemetry, operations teams can establish what traffic did, where it travelled, how it performed and where the user experience broke down, troubleshooting outages faster and gaining end-to-end visibility without stitching together multiple tools.

The strategic logic rests on what each platform knows that the other does not. Infoblox understands what sits on the network and why it should be trusted, while Kentik understands how traffic moves across that network and whether it is performing to expectation. Bringing the two together produces an infrastructure-centric intelligence platform in which network identity, DNS context, real-time traffic behaviour and AI-guided workflows converge in a single location, giving customers a correlated view that neither vendor could previously deliver alone.

“Infoblox sits at a unique intersection. Every device, application and cloud workload on a customer’s network runs through our technology, generating unparalleled context. With Kentik, we expand and enrich that context, allowing us to provide networking, cloud and security teams the real-time hybrid cloud intelligence they need to act with confidence,” said Scott Harrell, Chief Executive Officer, Infoblox.

He added that customers need robust data and insights for their agentic operations so they can deliver the increasing levels of resiliency, performance and security their businesses demand, and that the combination with Kentik makes that possible.

Correlated Identity And Traffic Data Compresses Security Triage And Feeds AI Tooling

The combined platform is expected to deliver benefits across three areas that map to how modern operations teams actually work. In hybrid and multi-cloud observability, Kentik’s topology maps enriched by Infoblox’s DNS names, asset context and user identity mean that every flow reveals not only where traffic went but who sent it and what it reached, giving network and operations teams a single correlated view with full context behind every source and destination.

On the security side, Infoblox’s preemptive, DNS-based threat intelligence will be correlated with Kentik’s flow data so that teams can confirm whether an asset connected, how much data left the network and which other assets it subsequently reached, compressing triage time and raising confidence in response decisions within one platform.

The third benefit centres on an AI-ready data foundation, a shared fabric providing a clean, continuously updated data layer that helps teams move from signal to answer to action, with integration through open protocols such as the Infoblox Model Context Protocol Server ultimately enabling teams to connect that fabric to the orchestration and AI tools they already use.

“Kentik’s vision has been to help organizations operate increasingly complex networks with intelligence rather than intuition, and Infoblox is the trusted source of truth and identity that provides the foundation for the infrastructure our customers depend on every day,” said Avi Freedman, Chief Executive Officer, Kentik.

“Combining that authoritative infrastructure context with Kentik’s network intelligence platform creates powerful new opportunities to automate operations, accelerate troubleshooting, strengthen security and support the velocity of networking today.”

The Acquisition Signals Where Enterprise Infrastructure Vendors See The Next Competitive Front

The deal reflects a broader recognition across the enterprise infrastructure sector that observability and security are converging on a shared data problem, and that the vendors able to unify identity, traffic and threat context stand to define how AI-driven operations mature.

As agentic tooling moves from experiment to production dependency, the value has shifted towards whoever can supply the trustworthy, correlated data layer beneath it, and Infoblox’s move to absorb a specialist observability platform rather than build the capability internally signals how quickly that market is consolidating.

Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. is acting as exclusive financial advisor and Fenwick & West LLP as legal advisor to Kentik, with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP acting as legal advisor to Infoblox.