enterprise-networking
(13)
Lumen Technologies
A Louisiana telephone descendant is wagering that the most valuable layer of AI may be the glass beneath it. Lumen is turning a sprawling fiber backbone into a programmable network enterprises can switch on in minutes.
Cisco
The company that quietly wired the internet is now betting its next chapter on securing and connecting the machines that run artificial intelligence.
Nile
Nile is a San Jose-based Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) company founded in 2018 by former Cisco leaders Pankaj Patel and John Chambers, along with Suresh Katukam and Sri Hosakote. It replaces the traditional buy-and-manage model for enterprise wired and wireless LANs with a cloud-delivered subscription that bundles hardware, software, zero-trust security, AI-driven automation, and performance guarantees. Nile designs, deploys, monitors, and continuously optimizes campus networks so IT teams no longer have to, targeting the roughly $75B enterprises spend each year running networks.
IP Fabric
IP Fabric is a vendor-neutral automated network assurance platform that discovers, verifies, visualizes, and documents large-scale enterprise networks. It builds an interactive digital twin of the actual network state - across on-premises and hybrid cloud - so engineers can validate intent, catch misconfigurations, keep the CMDB accurate, and prove compliance without manual audits. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Boston with engineering roots in Prague, the company raised a $25M Series B in 2023 and serves enterprises including Red Hat, Air France, and Major League Baseball.
NetBox Labs
NetBox Labs is the commercial company behind NetBox, the widely used open source network source of truth that engineering teams rely on to document, model, and automate their networks and infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by CEO Kris Beevers, the New York-based company builds commercial products - NetBox Cloud, NetBox Enterprise, NetBox Discovery, and NetBox Assurance - on top of the open source project, helping Fortune 500 enterprises, hyperscalers, AI data center operators, and government agencies replace spreadsheets and manual processes with an automation-ready model of their infrastructure.
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems is an American multinational technology company and the world's largest maker of networking hardware. Founded in 1984 by two Stanford computer scientists, it builds the routers, switches, silicon, security, and software that route much of the world's internet traffic. Today Cisco is repositioning around AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and observability - anchored by its 2024 acquisition of Splunk - while remaining the default backbone for enterprise, service-provider, and government networks.
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise networking company that designs wired and wireless infrastructure - switches, Wi-Fi access points and SD-WAN - and pairs it with cloud-managed, AI-driven software. Built around ExtremeCloud IQ and the newer Extreme Platform ONE, the company delivers cloud and increasingly AI-native networking to more than 50,000 customers worldwide, from NFL stadiums and hospitals to schools, factories and retailers. Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, it competes with Cisco, HPE Aruba, Juniper and Arista by pitching a single, simpler platform that unifies networking, security and analytics.
Megaport
Megaport is an Australian network-as-a-service company that lets enterprises spin up private, high-speed connections between data centers and the major public clouds in minutes rather than months. Through a software-defined network spanning more than 1,100 enabled data centers across some 30 countries, Megaport replaces the fixed contracts and manual provisioning of traditional telecom with on-demand, elastic bandwidth billed by the hour. Its platform - centered on Virtual Cross Connects, the Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge - connects over 4,000 customers to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hundreds of other providers. Listed on the ASX as MP1, the company is now extending from connectivity into compute as it builds toward a globally distributed AI inference cloud.
Aviz Networks
Aviz Networks is a San Jose-based networking software company that helps enterprises run open, vendor-agnostic networks built on the open-source SONiC operating system and layered with AI. Its stack - ONES, Open Packet Broker, and the GenAI Network Copilot - lets organizations deploy, observe, and operate multi-vendor, multi-ASIC networks across the data center, edge, and AI factory without vendor lock-in, combining 24x7 SONiC support with orchestration, telemetry, and plain-language automation.
Questivity
Questivity is a Santa Clara IT infrastructure integrator and training house. Founded in 1999, it designs, deploys, and supports the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise technology - networking, security, servers, storage, and virtualization - for mid-size and large organizations, and runs a parallel learning arm that hires, trains, and deploys engineers in Cisco, VMware, and data center disciplines. Its pitch is vendor-neutral: solve the client's problem with the right gear, on budget, rather than whatever a single manufacturer is selling.
Zayo Group
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.
Allied Telesis
Allied Telesis is a global networking infrastructure company that designs, manufactures, and supports wired and wireless products - switches, routers, firewalls, wireless access points, transceivers, and the software that manages them. Founded in Japan in 1987, it builds resilient, standards-based networks for governments, schools, hospitals, transportation systems, and smart cities, with a focus on automation (its Autonomous Management Framework), reliability, and supply-chain security.
Forward Networks, Inc.
Forward Networks builds a vendor-agnostic network digital twin - a mathematically accurate model of cloud and on-prem networks that lets enterprises query, verify, and harden infrastructure that has long since outgrown human capacity to reason about.