Enterprise networking is no longer just about moving packets—it’s about whether the infrastructure can keep pace with artificial intelligence demands. Last week, the ONUG community put that question to the test, and four companies came away with top honors.
ONUG, the 100,000-member community of enterprise IT leaders, announced the Best in Show winners from its AI Networking Summit, October 28–29 in New York City.
NAPLES, FL, UNITED STATES, November 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The winners—Alkira (a Lumen company), Cisco, DevAI and BlueCat—were recognized across the categories of AI Infrastructure, Networking, Automation and Security. Their solutions address a pressing need: building networks that are programmable, automated, secure and ready to handle AI at enterprise scale.
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The two-day summit drew nearly 1,750 attendees, a mix of enterprise IT practitioners, executives and technology innovators. Content was shaped by the ONUG Board, which includes IT leaders from HSBC, FedEx, Fidelity, RTX, Johnson & Johnson and Evernorth, and ran across five tracks: Infrastructure, Automation, Networking, Security and Post-Quantum Cryptography. Sessions tackled topics like the AI-native enterprise network fabric, the convergence of NOC and SOC operations, zero trust architectures and agentic operations.
Before the summit, ONUG Collaborative Working Groups issued a direct challenge to the vendor community: give enterprises real choice and options for deploying an agentic control plane, autonomous infrastructure and an AI-enabled security operations center (SOC). Fifteen companies responded, and Best in Show recognizes the four whose offerings best met that challenge.
“The enterprise leaders in the room this year weren’t asking whether AI will change their networks. They were asking how to run it safely, at scale, starting now. Each of this year’s Best in Show winners gave them a concrete answer,” said Nick Lippis, co-founder of ONUG and The AI Networking Summit.
The 2026 Best in Show winners
Best in Show, AI Infrastructure: Alkira, a Lumen company
Alkira won for its Network Infrastructure on Demand solutions. The partnership with Lumen brings a programmable approach to enterprise networking, unifying connectivity, routing, segmentation and visibility under one consistent operating model. The result gives enterprises the agility to stand up and scale the infrastructure that AI workloads require.
Best in Show, Networking: Cisco
Cisco earned the Networking award for its session, “Cisco AI Networking,” led by Richard Licon, Director of Technical Marketing for Data Center and AI Networking. Cisco showcased how its Nexus One platform and Cisco Cloud Control unify the four networks of an AI cluster—back-end GPU, front-end, storage and management fabrics—into a single console across NX-OS, ACI and SONiC. The company highlighted AI Canvas for agentic cross-domain troubleshooting, 800G Smart Switches for distributed stateful enforcement and Isovalent eBPF integration that extends visibility from Kubernetes pods into the physical fabric, demonstrating how enterprises can scale AI infrastructure without sacrificing security or observability.
Best in Show, Automation: DevAI
DevAI, a VC-backed startup building IT intelligence agents for enterprise IT, won Best in Show for Automation for the second consecutive year. In her session, “Don’t Feed the AI Lies: Data Truth Before Automation,” co-founder and CEO Dr. Susie Wee argued that automation and AI are only as good as the data beneath them. Before an agent can act on the network, enterprises need a trustworthy, verified view of what is actually there.
Best in Show, Security: BlueCat
BlueCat earned Best in Show for Security for its session “Six Queries, One Agent, No Identity: Making Agentic Traffic Legible,” led by Chief Product & Technology Officer Scott Fulton. BlueCat walked through a real-world scenario: an AI agent picks up a ticket and runs six unscripted queries, each leaving its own network footprint, with no identity tying them together. BlueCat demonstrated how enterprises can link those traces into a single unit of work, giving security and operations teams the visibility to govern agentic traffic and resolve issues faster.
Next stop: Frisco, Texas
The next ONUG AI Networking Summit is scheduled for May 12–13, 2027, in Frisco (Dallas), Texas. Enterprise IT leaders, practitioners and solution providers interested in attending, speaking or sponsoring can learn more at onug.net.
A notable shift is coming: ONUG plans to run a live Agentic 2.0 infrastructure at the Frisco summit and unleash exploits against it, testing in real time how agentic control planes detect and mitigate threats.
About ONUG
ONUG is a community of more than 100,000 enterprise IT leaders working together to shape the future of networking, security and infrastructure. Built “by the enterprise, for the enterprise,” ONUG brings practitioners and technology providers together through its AI Networking Summit series, working groups and year-round community programs. Learn more at onug.net.
William Sell
ONUG LLC
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AI Networking Summit Opening Keynote
Why it matters: The Best in Show winners were chosen not for flashy demos but for providing concrete answers to the operational challenges of running AI at scale. As ONUG prepares to test agentic control planes under live attack conditions in 2027, the message is clear: the industry is moving from talking about AI-ready networks to proving them under fire.
