GigaOm names Nokia “Leader" and "Outperformer” in Data Center Switching for fifth straight year

• Independent analysis highlights Nokia’s Data Center Fabric for innovation, performance and readiness for AI-scale infrastructure
• Nokia's Data Center Fabric Solution earns top marks for AI capabilities, automation, and reliability
• Recognition highlights how Nokia is delivering secure and reliable solutions in data center networking where it has clear technology leadership
  
  

April 08, 2026 

Espoo, Finland – Nokia today announced that it has been named a Leader and Outperformer in GigaOm’s 2026 Radar Report for Data Center Switching for the fifth consecutive year. This consistent recognition underscores Nokia's continued innovation and leadership in delivering robust, scalable, and highly automated data center networking solutions critical for the evolving demands of the AI era.

The annual GigaOm Radar evaluates leading data center switching solutions based on technical capabilities, product roadmaps and business criteria. In the 2026 report, Nokia’s Data Center Fabric solution is positioned in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant and classified as an Outperformer due to strong feature delivery and high scores across key and emerging capabilities.

GigaOm assessed ten leading vendors in the data center switching market and evaluated their offers against a set of core technical and operational criteria. Nokia’s Data Center Fabric received the highest possible five-star ratings across all key feature categories evaluated in the report, including hardware portfolio, switching and routing features, day 0, day 1 and day 2+ operations and management, NetDevOps suitability and traffic security. The report also recognized Nokia’s strengths in emerging capabilities such as AI-specific networking features and its microservices-based network operating system architecture.

“GigaOm’s analysis highlights Nokia’s consistent innovation in data center switching and its strong feature delivery over the past year. Its Data Center Fabric stands out for the depth of its hardware and software capabilities and strong support for automation that are designed to address the requirements of modern AI-driven data center environments,” said Andrew Green, Analyst at GigaOm.

The recognition also highlights Nokia’s expanding role in the data center ecosystem as enterprises, cloud providers and telecommunications providers modernize their infrastructure to support increasingly data-intensive applications and distributed cloud architectures.

“Being named a GigaOM data centre switching Leader and Outperformer for the fifth year in a row is validation of two things. First, we are doing the hard work of providing highly reliable data center solutions for cloud, enterprise, and service provider customers tasked with building in this AI era. And second, we are keeping pace with all the innovation being driven by AI. Openness, automation, scale and reliability are more than buzzwords. They require constant care and feeding, and this GigaOM recognition represents that,” said Michael Bushong, Vice President Data Center at Nokia.

For customers, this recognition reinforces Nokia’s focus on simplifying operations and improving reliability through its Human Error Zero strategy, which aims to eliminate both software defects and configuration errors that can impact data center networks.

Nokia’s Data Center Fabric combines high-capacity switching platforms, the SR Linux network operating system and the Event-Driven Automation (EDA) platform to deliver programmable, highly automated data center networks. The solution is designed to support both greenfield and brownfield deployments and integrates easily into heterogeneous environments, enabling enterprises, cloud providers, colocation operators and service providers to evolve their data center infrastructure while maintaining the simplicity of their operations.

Multimedia, technical information and related news

Report:             GigaOm’s 2026 Radar Report for Data Center Switching
Webpage:         Nokia Data Center Fabric
Webpage:         Nokia Event-Driven Automation
Webpage:         Nokia Data Center Networks

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