I mostly agree with this sentiment - working for systems integrators over the years, it is very hard to convince me that most corporate customers need network automation solutions, when on average they deploy a new network maybe once every 5 years, and when the deployment is done, it structurally changes very little until the next hardware replacement.
However there are definitely business in the managed service provider, ISP and obviously anyone with a large growing data centre environment where consistency and accuracy in large-scale deployemnts are important.
Most managed service providers and ISP's have developed their own simple "automation" tools for managing customers network. It's easy when the config is mostly the same across all customers.
Exactly, and the change count (add new customer with 50 sites, remove old customer with 100 sites) are big enough to warrant investment of time/money into these tools
However there are definitely business in the managed service provider, ISP and obviously anyone with a large growing data centre environment where consistency and accuracy in large-scale deployemnts are important.