NEC XON was 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,” says Anthony Laing, GM 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 twenty 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.