By Will Eatherton,
Publication Date: 2026-10-12 15:00:00
I have spent most of my career balancing two key forces in network decisions. One is the freedom to design a network your way. The other is the discipline required to operate that network at scale, across hardware and software boundaries, over time. In hyperscale environments, teams have already shown that SONiC can deliver on both promises. They have built large, efficient networks around an open NOS and helped move SONiC from an experiment to a proven platform.
Bringing SONiC into the enterprise
The question now is less whether SONiC can scale and more whether it can fit the enterprise. Enterprise networks are not one fleet with one operating model. They bring multiple hardware generations, existing routing and management systems, stricter change controls, and operations teams that may not own the entire software stack. The challenge is bringing SONiC into that environment without creating a new island of operations.
Customers often ask me a similar question: how do we keep the…
