Data Center Network Solutions

The last time Forrester scored this market under its current name, it was 2013, eight vendors were evaluated, and not one of them was named a Leader. The report that resulted had to explain why an entire industry had failed to clear the bar. The category then went unscored for eight years while AI training turned data center networking into one of the largest infrastructure purchases an enterprise can make.

The Forrester Wave: Data Center Network Solutions, Q3 2026 ends that gap. It evaluates eleven vendors against thirty-two criteria, and it names three Leaders. It also places NVIDIA, the company that supplies most of the AI networking silicon behind the boom that made this market matter, at the bottom of the Contenders band.

The category came back with Leaders this time

Forrester has renamed this evaluation in each generation. The Q1 2013 Wave went out as Data Center Networking Hardware and charted eight vendors with zero Leaders. The Q1 2018 edition ran as Hardware Platforms for Software-Defined Networking and named Huawei and Juniper as Leaders. The 2026 edition is the first under the Data Center Network Solutions name, and the first to score the category in eight years.

The return matters more than the rename. Between 2018 and 2026 the market changed shape twice: once when hyperscale operators rebuilt their fabrics around higher-speed switching, and again when AI training clusters made the network a first-order constraint on how fast a model can be trained rather than a supporting utility underneath it.

A vendor-announcement wave clustered on 19 August 2026, which is when the placements became public. Forrester's own publication day for the report is not something this article can confirm, and Forrester has not published an author byline that could be verified either, so neither is stated here.

What the Q3 2026 Forrester Wave for Data Center Network Solutions scored

The evaluation covers eleven vendors against thirty-two criteria and sorts them into three bands. There is no Challengers band at all, which is unusual and worth pausing on: the field splits into vendors Forrester considers strong, vendors it considers adequate, and nothing in between.

The absence of a Challengers band says something about a market where the leaders have durable positions and the rest are either early or narrowly scoped. It is not a statement that the middle of the market is empty in commercial terms. Several of the Contenders sell into the same accounts as the Leaders.

The report also carries customer-feedback halos, awarded where a vendor's own customers rate it above average. Arista Networks and Huawei both hold one. No vendor holds two, so there is no Customer Favorite designation this edition. Cisco, the largest vendor in the market by revenue, holds no halo.

Three Leaders and no Challengers

The Leaders are Arista Networks, Cisco, and Huawei. That is a shorter Leader band than most infrastructure Waves produce, and it concentrates a market that had been scored as leaderless thirteen years earlier.

Arista Networks arrives as both a Leader and a halo holder, which is the strongest combined position in the report. Cisco arrives as a Leader without a halo, meaning its customers rate it at or below the market average even as Forrester rates its strategy and current offering highly. Huawei arrives as a Leader with a halo.

The Strong Performers are Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nokia, H3C, and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The Contenders are Dell Technologies, Extreme Networks, NVIDIA, and ZTE.

Juniper Networks does not appear on the chart under its own name. Its portfolio now sits inside Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which holds a Strong Performer placement, so the vendor that was named a Leader in the 2018 edition is present in this one only as part of an acquirer.

NVIDIA finished last in the market it supplies

The most reported finding is NVIDIA's placement at the bottom of the Contenders band, and the reason Forrester gives is the interesting part. Forrester writes that NVIDIA's focus on AI data centers leaves gaps in its vision and roadmap for hybrid cloud, edge networking, and zero trust.

The scoring makes the split explicit. NVIDIA received the top score, 5.0, in AI Infrastructure Support. It received 1 out of 5 for Vision. The single criterion where it is untouchable is not the criterion that carries the evaluation.

That gap between criterion weight and market reality is the substance of the argument that followed publication. Zeus Kerravala, writing in NetworkWorld on 4 September 2026, observed that AI infrastructure support accounted for only two percent of the overall weighting, and argued that a benchmark organized that way will keep producing results that look wrong to buyers standing in front of an AI cluster.

Both readings can be true. Forrester is scoring a general-purpose data center network vendor, and by that measure a company that sells into AI fabrics and little else is narrow. A buyer whose entire 2027 network plan is an AI training cluster is not buying a general-purpose vendor, and for that buyer the evaluation's center of gravity is somewhere else.

Where the customer-feedback halos landed

Halos are the part of a Forrester Wave that comes from customers rather than analysts, and they are worth separating from the placements because the two sometimes disagree. This edition awards two: Arista Networks and Huawei.

Cisco's absence from the halo list is the notable one. It is a Leader, it is the incumbent in a large share of enterprise data centers, and its own customers did not rate it above the market average on the feedback measures the report uses. That is a pattern worth tracking across editions rather than treating as a verdict from one.

No vendor holds a double halo, so the Customer Favorite designation does not appear in this edition. In editions where it does, it usually marks a vendor with strong placements and strong customer sentiment at once.

Juniper is on this chart only through HPE

The 2018 edition named Huawei and Juniper as Leaders. Huawei is a Leader again in 2026. Juniper is not on the chart, because its networking business now sits inside Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which placed as a Strong Performer.

For buyers who standardized on Juniper, that is the practical fact in this report. The product line continues, the roadmap is now set by a different company with its own data center networking portfolio, and the evaluation will score the combined business rather than the original one going forward.

This is the second time in the series that a named Leader has stopped charting separately, and it is a reminder that these evaluations measure corporate entities as much as products. A vendor's placement can change because the vendor changed owners.

What to ask before you accept the AI networking claim

Which network is actually being replaced? The evaluation scores general-purpose data center networking, including hybrid cloud, edge, and zero trust posture. If the project is a single AI training fabric, ask the vendor to speak to that deployment directly rather than to its quadrant position.

What did the customer feedback say? Two vendors hold halos and one of them is not the market's revenue leader. Ask any shortlisted vendor for its halo status and, if it has none, ask what its own reference customers say about the same measures.

Is the roadmap yours or the acquirer's? Juniper's portfolio now ships under HPE. Any vendor that has changed hands recently should be asked the same question, because the evaluation will score the parent.

How much weight does AI infrastructure carry? In this edition it was two percent of the overall score. Ask how a vendor's position would change if that weight rose, and treat the answer as a statement about the next edition rather than this one.

What does the report not cover? Four vendors sit in Contenders and one of them leads the market in AI silicon. A placement describes fit against a defined set of criteria, not the ceiling of what a vendor can do.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The adjacent shortlist item is Multicloud Container Platforms: kubernetes is free and standardized, so what these platforms actually sell is fleet discipline across hundreds of clusters, a VMware exodus, and the edge.

See also the newer Private 5G Services: the first ever scorecard for this category named a neutral network host, not an equipment vendor or a telecom giant, as its Leader, evidence the market's value has moved from the radio itself to whoever operates everything riding on it.

The neighboring coverage here is AI Network Fabrics. Roughly 200 organizations running high-end AI data centers are about to outspend the other 100,000 ordinary data centers threefold on networking gear, and the leftover supply chain is about to feel it.

The related category on this site is Managed Network Services. Gartner's 2026 quadrant crowns a satellite operator, a security specialist, and three global integrators as Leaders in the same field, proof that every vendor now sells AI-driven network operations regardless of where they started.