NEC XON named HPE Networking Service Provider Global Alliance of the Year 2026

From left: Rob Horner, Senior Director Global Alliances at HPE and Anthony Laing, General Manager Networking Business Unit at NEC XON.

---

NEC XON has been named HPE Networking Service Provider Global Alliance of the Year 2026 at HPE Discover 2026. It is the sixth consecutive year NEC has earned this global alliance recognition – back-to-back from 2021 through 2025, and again in 2026, now under HPE following its acquisition of Juniper Networks. The award is specified for the service-provider networking category as HPE’s portfolio spans both Aruba and Juniper, and it confirms NEC XON as the partner trusted to deliver carrier-grade networking outcomes across Africa, year after year.

The message from the Discover stage was unambiguous: AI is the future of the industry, but it is built on a foundation of networking – and that foundation has to be strong for AI to succeed at scale. For NEC XON, that has been the operating principle for two decades.

“For 20 years, we’ve been told the network no longer matters – first the cloud, then the over-the-top giants, now AI,” said Anthony Laing, General Manager of the Networking Business Unit at NEC XON. “Every time, the opposite proved true. None of it reaches a customer without connectivity underneath it. With AI there are only two choices – be disrupted, or be the disruptor. We’ve helped African operators be the disruptor for 20 years and we intend to do exactly that with AI.”

NEC XON’s credibility is evidence-based: 266 active vendor certifications across more than 60 engineers; advanced multi-vendor laboratories in South Africa and Kenya alongside the NEC XON Experience Centre in Midrand; Africa’s first TIP Phoenix deployment (2022); the continent’s first live 400G optical transponder (2023); and the world’s first TIP Gold Badge for network operating systems (2025). Operator-scale references include MTN, Airtel Africa, Herotel, MetroFibre Networx, TeraCo, Emtel and Telecom Namibia.

“We don’t sell boxes,” said Laing. “We know our clients so well, and have built our operations so tightly around them that we have become a trusted advisor — the partner that accelerates adoption of game-changing technology while understanding, from day one, what makes commercial sense. Start small, prove it and scale on the revenue the platform generates – not on multimillion-rand upfront risk, and not on tender processes so long the opportunity is gone before they conclude.”

NEC XON is now applying that principle directly to AI. The company is launching a zero-risk AI acceleration programme, offered first and on its most generous terms to a small number of customers who have trusted NEC XON with their network infrastructure for years. The programme pairs a GPU-equipped HPE server with custom software developed by NEC XON, leading AI software, and NEC XON’s own business consultants to deliver a working, in-house AI solution within two weeks. Crucially, it puts tangible tools in employees’ hands – making their jobs easier, lifting productivity and empowering teams across support, order management, commercial, contract management, governance and cyber security from day one. The same programme is available to new customers at promotional pricing, with no upfront capital and no risk.

With Juniper now part of HPE, NEC XON brings a unified stack to the African AI opportunity – networking, compute, storage, GPU, cloud, software, GreenLake consumption financing and AI-factory infrastructure – wrapped in the capability that actually unlocks adoption: go-to-market, commercial modelling, full managed services, compliance and governance, and automation. “This is the joint business model that worked for 20 years with Juniper,” said Laing. “It is what will work for the next 20 with HPE, into the new world of AI.”