This week, industry analyst firm Gartner® published the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Data Center Switching, its assessment of the data center networking industry. Nokia is named as a Visionary in this first edition of the report.

We believe this exciting news reflects our leadership in strategic direction for data center switching. Customers are choosing us because of where we are headed and the impact we are having on the market.

A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.

At Nokia, we work closely with our customers, which include the largest data centers in the world, to build solutions that address challenges that make a difference in what they want to do. Our strategic direction focuses on three simple words: human error zero.

There are two sources of human error in networks: mistakes that vendors introduce through software bugs and hardware issues, and operational miscues that stem from complex infrastructure.

Our data center solutions feature the industry's highest-quality hardware and software. That's not a sweeping statement without support. With a developer-to-tester ratio of 1:1, we prioritize quality above all else, and we back it with actual investment in our testing tools and resources. Everything that goes into production anywhere ultimately gets tested. The question is who is doing the testing—you or your supplier. With Nokia products, that answer is clear: it’s us.

We complement this commitment to quality with the industry's most robust multivendor operations platform. Architected on the latest tools and techniques, our platform features model-driven control, validation using a digital twin, modern DevOps practices such as GitOps, and integration with a host of tools from the surrounding ecosystem. We included these capabilities explicitly to support multivendor networks. This gives our customers the flexibility they need to exert supplier control or gracefully migrate away from aging infrastructure.

For us, the Gartner report comes at an exciting time. We have been ratcheting up our data center efforts in many different ways. For example:

• We are proud to be a part of Microsoft, CoreWeave, Nscale, and Equinix data centers.

• We have enhanced our optics portfolio by acquiring Infinera.

• We have added multivendor, intent-based management support.

• We have extended our network operating support to include SONiC.

• We have landed key partnerships with Kyndryl and Lenovo.

On top of these achievements, we recently announced that we are redirecting approximately EUR 100 million incremental per year towards our data center ambitions. We will pursue these ambitions under the leadership of data center diehard and Intel alum Justin Hotard.

Our industry, especially in the era of AI, will move on three things: uncommon reliability, simple operations and affordable pricing. Everything else—all the noise and hype—is a distraction. Data centers should just work. They should be easy to manage. And they should not break the bank.

In our opinion, being named a Visionary in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Switching and gaining customer and partner traction are exciting developments.  We are executing at a level that differentiates and helps our customers move ahead in a direction that matters to them.

Access your complimentary copy of the report here. No registration is required.

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