network-automation
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Ciena’s AI opportunity runs through old fiber
The company that helped telephone carriers squeeze more from their cables is selling the same economic idea to the AI era. The speeds have changed. The appeal of avoiding another dig has not.
Superloop wants your broadband bill. Or a cut of someone else’s.
The Australian telco has turned fibre, acquisitions and other companies’ customers into an A$664 million business. Its most interesting product may be the machinery behind the brand on your bill.
EfficientIP wants to give the network team its afternoon back
At Société Générale, a two-hour application-switching task fell to ten minutes. Behind that small victory sits a French software company selling control over the network services almost nobody notices until they stop working.
The Cloud Has an API. Console Connect Wants the Network to Have One Too.
Console Connect puts a cloud-style control panel on PCCW Global's private backbone. The result is a network you can order in clicks - provided the fibre, ports and last mile are already where you need them.
Amdocs Runs the Boring Machinery Behind Your Phone - Now It Wants AI in the Control Room
For four decades, Amdocs made money where telecom gets painfully complicated: orders, bills, care and network operations. Its next act is aOS, an agentic layer meant to coordinate the whole machine - if carriers trust AI close to the cash register.
Calix's $2 Billion Bet: Stop Selling Speed, Start Selling the Experience
The old Calix sold boxes to phone companies. The new Calix gives 1,200-plus broadband providers a cloud, an AI workforce and a menu of services designed to make a commodity connection feel local again.
The Khan Brothers Sold the Network Once. Then They Rebuilt It for the Cloud.
Alkira turned the least cloud-like part of cloud computing - the network - into an on-demand service. Eight years, $176 million in funding and one $475 million acquisition later, its biggest test is whether software and fiber can finally behave like one product.
Infoblox Turned the Internet’s Boring Plumbing Into a Security Alarm
The company made a business out of the chores nobody notices until the network breaks. Now it is betting that DNS can tell security teams what is about to go wrong - before another tool raises the alarm.
Versa Networks Is Selling Less Network - and That’s the Point
The Santa Clara company built one operating system for the jobs enterprises once handed to a small army of routers, firewalls and cloud-security tools. The bet works when consolidation beats specialization - and when the migration team does the unglamorous teaching.
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.
EXFO Built the Picks and Shovels for the Fiber Gold Rush - Now It Is Testing the AI Boom
The Quebec City company made its name finding microscopic faults in fiber networks. After four decades of expansion, acquisitions and a return to private ownership, EXFO is narrowing its focus just as AI data centers turn network testing into a much bigger problem.
Able Device Bet the Tiny SIM Card Could Run Your IoT Fleet. Now the Market Is Catching Up.
For 16 years, a nine-person Raleigh company has argued that the most underused computer in telecom is already inside the device. SIMbae turns that overlooked chip into a programmable traffic cop for connected fleets - with no new hardware and far less Java Card work.
Connectbase Wants to Turn Telecom's Spreadsheet Swamp Into One Click
The fiber business still runs on stale building lists, email chains and quotes that arrive after the buyer has moved on. Connectbase is betting that location truth, shared APIs and a two-sided network can turn that administrative drag into software - but only if the industry's data and partners show up.
MaiaEdge Wants to Turn the Internet’s ‘Big Middle’ Into a Push-Button Business
Private connectivity still gets negotiated by spreadsheet and activated on telecom time. MaiaEdge’s hardware-and-software bet is that operators can turn months of coordination into minutes - without handing the customer to somebody else.
Rakuten Symphony
Rakuten built a mobile network in Japan, then turned the operating lessons into software for everyone else. The wager is that telecom's next upgrade looks less like a hardware swap and more like a cloud migration.
Arrcus, Inc.
Arrcus wants the network to stop arriving as a sealed appliance. Its software runs across white-box switches, clouds and edge sites - and now the company is betting that AI will make that freedom more valuable.
Netmaker
Netmaker is an open-source virtual networking platform built on WireGuard that automates fast, secure, distributed mesh networks across clouds, data centers, edge sites, and devices. Founded by former IBM cloud engineers Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns, it lets teams stitch together servers, containers, IoT devices, and remote users into a single flat, encrypted network - a kind of VPC for distributed systems. A YC W22 company, Netmaker pairs a widely adopted open-source project with paid Professional and Enterprise editions aimed at businesses and managed service providers.
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.
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.
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.
Relay2 Inc.
Relay2 Inc. is a Milpitas, California networking company that builds Wi-Fi access points with computing and storage baked in. Its patented ServiceEdge Platform and Service Point devices let businesses and managed service providers run applications at the network edge - on-premises, close to where data is created - instead of shuttling everything to the cloud. Founded in 2011 by Eric Chen, Relay2 targets retail, education, manufacturing, transportation and MSPs that want to lower the total cost of deploying enterprise-class WLAN while unlocking new edge services.
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.