Nokia recognised in data centre switching report

Author: Joe Peck

Finnish telecommunications company Nokia has been named a Leader and Outperformer in the 2026 data centre switching Radar Report by GigaOm, marking the fifth consecutive year it has received this recognition.

The annual report evaluates data centre switching platforms based on technical capabilities, product development plans, and business criteria. In the 2026 edition, Nokia’s Data Center Fabric is positioned in the Innovation/Platform Play category and classified as an Outperformer.

GigaOm assessed 10 vendors in the market, comparing their offerings against a range of operational and technical benchmarks. Nokia’s platform received five-star ratings across all key feature areas reviewed, including hardware, switching and routing functionality, operational management, NetDevOps alignment, and traffic security.

Focus on automation and AI-ready networking

The report also highlights Nokia’s capabilities in areas such as AI-focused networking features and its microservices-based network operating system architecture.

Andrew Green, Analyst at GigaOm, says, “GigaOm’s analysis highlights Nokia’s consistent innovation in data centre 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 centre environments.”

The recognition reflects broader trends in the data centre sector, where organisations are updating infrastructure to support data-intensive workloads and distributed cloud environments.

Michael Bushong, Vice President Data Center at Nokia, comments, “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 centre 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 recognition represents that.”

Nokia’s Data Center Fabric combines switching platforms, the SR Linux network operating system, and an event-driven automation platform to support automated data centre environments. It is designed to be deployed in both new and existing infrastructure and to integrate with a range of network environments.