ONUG Names Best in Show Winners at the AI Networking Summit New York 2026

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/ -- Alkira (a Lumen company), Cisco, DevAI and BlueCat honored across AI Infrastructure, Networking, Automation and Security

ONUG, the 100,000-member community of enterprise IT leaders, today announced the Best in Show winners from its AI Networking Summit, held Oct. 28–29 in New York City. Selected across four categories, this year’s winners showed how enterprises can build networks that are programmable, automated, secure and ready for AI at scale.

Two days, nearly 1,750 attendees

Nearly 1,750 attendees joined the two-day summit, bringing together enterprise IT practitioners, executives and technology innovators. Content developed by the ONUG Board, including leaders from HSBC, FedEx, Fidelity, RTX, Johnson & Johnson and Evernorth, ran across five tracks: Infrastructure, Automation, Networking, Security and Post-Quantum Cryptography. Sessions covered the AI-native enterprise network fabric, NOC/SOC convergence, zero trust and agentic operations.

Ahead of the summit, ONUG Collaborative Working Groups issued a 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 accepted the challenge and developed responses. Best in Show recognizes the four whose solutions best met it.

“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, a Lumen company, won for its Network Infrastructure on Demand solutions. Alkira and Lumen bring a programmable approach to enterprise networking, unifying connectivity, routing, segmentation and visibility in one consistent operating model. The result gives enterprises the agility to stand up and scale the infrastructure AI workloads demand.

Best in Show, Networking: Cisco
Cisco earned Best in Show for Networking for its session, “Cisco AI Networking,” led by Richard Licon, Director of Technical Marketing for Data Center and AI Networking. Cisco demonstrated 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. Highlighting 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, Cisco showed 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 made the case 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 showed 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 will take place 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.

The challenge moves from presentation to proof in 2027. 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
+1 508-596-6118
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