August 25, 2020

Press Release

DriveNets Wins 2020 Leading Lights Company of the Year Award

Telecoms prestigious awards program recognizes DriveNets leadership in driving service providers and cloud hyperscalers’ transformation to software-based networks

Raanana, Israel, August 25th 2020 – DriveNets, the networking software company, today announced that it has been named the winner of Light Reading’s Leading Lights Awards 2020 for Company of the Year (Private). As a winner in the category, DriveNets is recognized as “the privately held firm that stands out from its competitors, innovates constantly, makes investors proud and makes employees happy.” DriveNets brings radical cost reduction and operational simplicity to the high-scale network world and is being adopted by some of the world’s largest telecom service providers.

The winners of the telecom industry’s most prestigious awards program were announced on August 21, in a special online ceremony. The Leading Lights program, comprising 21 categories, recognizes the industry’s top companies and their executives for outstanding achievements in next-generation communications technology, applications, services, strategies and innovation.

“The shift to open software, white box hardware, and platform virtualization initially led by the cloud hyperscalers, is now expanding to high-scale communications service provider networks. This is consistent with findings from the survey Heavy Reading released earlier in the year on the Future of IP Networking, in which software-based networking and disaggregated hardware and software were identified by service providers as the most important selection criteria for IP networking projects,” said Sterling Perrin, Sr. Principal Analyst – Optical Networking & Transport at Heavy Reading. “DriveNets’ recognition as the 2020 Private Company of the Year in Light Reading’s Leading Lights awards program demonstrates the strong momentum of this shift and the key role DriveNets is playing in the adoption of this approach by tier-1 operators.”

“We are honored to be the recipients of such a prestigious award and strong market recognition. There is a big shift currently taking place in the networking market towards software, cloud-native and open ecosystems and this recognition is an acknowledgement of DriveNets’ key role in it. We would like to thank our incredible ecosystem partners – white box, optical and chip vendors as well as system integrators who believed in the vision and worked with us to ensure our joint customers are successful.” said Ido Susan, CEO & Co-founder, DriveNets.

DriveNets Network Cloud is revolutionizing Service Providers (CSPs) and Cloud Hyperscalers networks by disaggregating the network infrastructure from core to edge, in the same way Hyperscalers disaggregated the Cloud infrastructure. It’s the only solution on the market that supports the Distributed Disaggregated Chassis (DDC) model supported by the OCP and the only disaggregated router to scale from a single-box router of 4Tb/s, to a cluster of white boxes operated as a single router of 768 Tb/s (7680 ports of 100G or 1920 ports of 400G). DriveNets’ unique economic model allows CSPs and Hyperscalers to buy networking white boxes directly from their manufacturers at cost+ and buy DriveNets’ networking software license separately, rather than on a per port/box basis. This new model allows CSPs and Hyperscalers to scale much faster, increase profitability, improve operational efficiency and avoid vendor-lock.

The Leading Lights award is the latest in a series of awards for DriveNets who were recently recognized as one of CRN’s 2020 Emerging Vendors and named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the Communications Service Provider Network Operations category.

“This year’s Leading Lights Awards entries show how the global communications industry is experiencing and embracing change, all while continuing to improve one of modern society’s foundational resources,” said Light Reading Editor-in-Chief Phil Harvey. “The judges were challenged to pick winners among several groups of really closely matched finalists and we think the whole group should be proud of their achievements. Congratulations, everyone.”

A complete list of all of the Leading Lights Awards winners can be found at Light Reading: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=763311

Judging was conducted by Light Reading’s editors and the analyst team from Heavy Reading. (http://www.heavyreading.com).

About DriveNets

DriveNets is a fast-growing IP networking software company, introducing a radical new way to build networks for service and cloud providers, enabling higher capacity and service scale at a much lower cost.

Founded by Ido Susan and Hillel Kobrinsky, two successful telco entrepreneurs, DriveNets Network Cloud is the leading open distributed disaggregated routing solution based on cloud-native software and standard white boxes, that disaggregates the network from core to edge, building the high-scale network infrastructures of the future.

About Light Reading

Light Reading is an independent B2B digital media platform providing daily news analysis and insight for the global communications networking and services industry. Our broad readership and solid reputation make us the leading resource for telecom, mobile and cable network operators; cloud services players; and all the companies that develop and supply them with technology, applications and professional services. Light Reading has over 500,000 qualified registered users, our websites attract over 1.3 million monthly page views and our newsletters are sent out to 220,000 opt-in subscribers. Our brand is also active across all social media channels, with over 100,000 members and followers. The Light Reading Group incorporates a dedicated research division, Heavy Reading; more than 15 successful annual industry events, including the Big 5G Event; several targeted online communities, including The 5G Exchange, Connecting Africa and Broadband World News, that dig even deeper into key areas of the global communications industry; and its sister industry news site Telecoms.com.