A range of companies collected awards for outstanding contributions to the progress of network automation at this year’s Network Automation Awards – held as part of the Layer123 Reunion Network Automation Congress.
The ceremony took place on the evening of 27 April in Madrid after a day of sessions, presentations and long-awaited catchups over coffees and wines at the Congress. With no Dan Pitt in Madrid this year, the awards were presented by the other half of the traditional Layer123 awards duo - Spirent’s Marc Cohn.
A panel of Mac and five other judges – AvidThink’s Roy Chua, Lightcounting’s Stéphane Teral, OCP’s Cliff Grossner, Johanne Meyer, and finally Mark Mortensen from ACG Research – chose winners across eight categories from what they have seen in the industry over the past year.
Here are the winners and why they won:
Most Significant Disruptor: Network Operators
Rakuten Symphony for their contributions and commitment to driving the Open RAN ecosystem based on their unique approach to building and operating their Mobile Network.
Most Significant Disruptor: Vendor/Solution Providers
Huawei for extensive industry contributions, innovations, and influence.
Best Contribution to Open Networking
MEF for the SD-WAN Standards Platform, the industry’s first SD-WAN managed services standard. MEF is also pioneering security standards for securing SD-WAN, based on the emerging SASE and Zero Trust architecture.
Best Cloud-Managed Network
Amazon Web Services for their Global Network Infrastructure, extensive partnering, and groundbreaking work to extend the Cloud to AWS customers.
Best Hardware Innovation
Nokia for the Nokia Air Frame Open Edge and FrontHaul Gateway Servers optimized for the emerging 5G mobile networks.
Best Edge Computing with MEC
MobileEdgeX for advancing mobile edge computing with BT, DT, and Telefonica.
Best Network Disaggregation solution
Mavenir for disaggregation of the 5G Core, and contributions to ORAN.
Sustainability Award
ScaleMatrix for their innovations to address the ever-increasing demands for compute density to efficiently enable the Edge.
Congratulations to all the winners!