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.
Accton spent decades building the switches behind other companies’ brands. Now AI has turned that quiet Taiwanese manufacturing playbook into an $8 billion open-infrastructure business - and pulled it from the rack into optics, cooling and compute.
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.
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.

Jun Shi is CEO and President of Accton Technology, the $7.9B Taiwanese ODM powerhouse behind much of the world's white-box networking hardware. A 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley's networking giants — Cisco, Juniper, and F5 — he shepherded startup Volterra from inception through its $500 million acquisition before joining Accton in 2023. Now he's steering the company's ambitious pivot: from hardware maker to full-stack open infrastructure provider, anchored by Nexvec, a turnkey AI-ready infrastructure solution launched in May 2025.