The 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.

As we enter mid-2025, it's interesting to take a fresh look at the landscape for power utilities and the communication networks they use. Coming away from several days at the UTC 2025 Telecom and Technology Conference in Long Beach, California, it struck me that the trends we saw just a year ago are even more in focus.

The demand for bandwidth has been a constant drumbeat for decades, and the rise of AI is putting it front and center once again. Optical technologies will play a key role in data center interconnect for tasks like training machine learning models, as well as interconnect to edge clouds and on-premises servers that for latency reasons, need to do inferencing locally.

Data center networks are plagued by human error, poor visibility and complexity. Outages aren't just frustrating; they're symptoms of a deeper issue. The way we manage networks is fundamentally broken.