infrastructure-orchestration
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Ian Bresnahan and the Trouble Between the Machines
From service assurance to AI agents, the Itential co-founder has kept working on one stubborn problem: getting complicated networks to change without making life harder for the people who run them.
Kristen Rachels Has a Rule for the AI Era: Own the Number
The Itential CMO spent two decades translating complex enterprise software into a reason to care. Now she is rebuilding marketing around agents, accountability, and a stubbornly human appetite for curiosity.
Itential Wants AI to Run the Network - Without Letting It Freelance
The Atlanta software company spent a decade turning scattered scripts into governed workflows. Now it is making the same bargain with AI: you can think on your feet, but you still need a change ticket.
MetalSoft
MetalSoft is a Chicago-based infrastructure software company that turns racks of physical servers, switches, and storage into cloud-like, self-service infrastructure. Its CloudPlex platform automates the full lifecycle of multi-vendor bare metal hardware - discovery, OS and firmware deployment, network fabric configuration, and storage - so enterprises and service providers can provision dedicated infrastructure on demand via a UI or API. Spun out of cloud hosting company Hostway in 2019 and led by serial founder Lucas Roh, MetalSoft raised a $16M Series A in December 2022 and has since pivoted hard toward orchestrating GPU clusters and 'AI factories' for telcos, data center operators, and Fortune 500 enterprises.