It’s been a big year for networking. Nvidia reminded the world it’s the essential plumbing behind the world’s AI dreams, and big-buck deals like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper were a reminder of networking’s market potency.

As such, networking won big in 2025. But they can’t all be winners, as they say, and the year saw its fair share of … well, losers is probably a little unfair, but let’s say some companies, technologies, and even continents weren’t on the winning team, unfortunately.

In that spirit, SDxCentral presents its winners and losers of 2025. Do not take our editor's picks as investment advice and certainly do not take it personally if you were any of the unlucky ones this year. There’s always an opportunity to turn things around in 2026.

WINNER: Meter

There aren’t many new names in networking that cover both hardware and software with aplomb. And there are certainly fewer to have all-star backing from the sort of headline name even the casual tech observer may recognize.

That’s why I’m naming Meter as a winner of 2025, a network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform founded in 2015 that has now found its feet in the AI data center era.

This year, the firm raised $170 million in a Series C round, with the startup currently valued at $1 billion. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been a key investor, having co-led a $35 million Series B round for the firm last year. And everyone knows Sam Altman, right? It’s the only networking firm he’s splashed the cash on, too.

It also launched partnerships this year with Lumen and poached some talent from Cisco Meraki for hardware engineering and sales prowess.

Meter also boasts a slick website and kit with an Apple-esque aesthetic that will likely appeal to Gen Z-ers. I’m sure their visual flair caught Sam Altman’s eyes as it did mine, although, unfortunately, I don’t have millions to spare.

- Giacomo Lee, News Editor

LOSER: Europe

With half of my heritage stemming from continental Europe, it hurts to type this, but: ol’ Europa has become the poor man of … well, everything.

You may recognize that sentence as a riff on the U.K. once being the poor man of Europe. Well, I’d include merry old Britain in that analysis, too, and not just because post-Brexit the U.K. may be returning to that impoverished status. You see, no fancy OpenAI or Nscale mega deals can dissuade me from looking down on Great Britain and the entire European continent in its efforts toward both digital sovereignty and AI domination.

There’s a big problem when you have the most European tech exec around saying Europe’s efforts to build more data centers are a futile endeavor. That was the opinion of SAP CEO Christian Klein this summer, with the enterprise giant's chief saying the continent should focus on winning in AI software instead.

I doubt it’s capable of even coming close to the U.S. and Asia on that front, either. A panel at this year’s DCD Compute 2025 reminded attendees that Europe doesn’t pay for talent anywhere near as much as other regions.

The European Union (EU) has also continued to be caught with its proverbial flag down when it comes to hyperscaler dominance. Both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure saw major outages this year, and yet Europeans still don’t see any telecom-style regulation on the Big Clouds despite the EU’s love of red tape.

The EU has also seen blowback from the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), with the trade group jeering how long it took the the EU to greenlight Broadcom’s problematic acquisition of VMware – 672 days, in fact, a passage of time that saw the U.S. giant annoy a major Dutch water ministry with legal ramifications (and many other VMware users, too, but with plenty of B2B press coverage from the likes of SDxCentral instead of legal vindication).

And when you have Microsoft's legal director for France publicly admitting the cloud provider can’t protect French user data from U.S. demands, it’s hard to take Europe’s data sovereignty drive with a straight face.

- Giacomo Lee, News Editor

WINNER: Broadcom

Now, hear me out.

I know there are a lot of people down on Broadcom, especially those with strong ties to VMware, and how they feel about how Broadcom has besmirched VMware’s legacy. I get it.

But, from a pure business perspective, you have to admit that despite the drama, Broadcom this year has quickly turned its VMware holdings into an operational juggernaut.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has stated that more than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers have signed up for the vendor’s halo Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform and accompanying subscription licensing plan. Sure, there have been headaches along the way, but those pains don’t seem to yet be coming from within Broadcom.

On top of that, Broadcom was able to ride the year’s AI boom toward tens-of-billions-of-dollars in revenues from both its networking and compute operations.

I know there will always be disagreement about how Broadcom operates, but it’s hard to argue over its ability to execute in 2025.

- Dan Meyer, Executive Editor

LOSER: The internet

It hurts to say this about our one true love as technology journalists, but this year was a bad year for mon amour, the internet.

We have AI ingesting the web and spitting it out and re-ingesting it, making a dog’s dinner of search results and probably the future knowledge base of humanity.

We have Reddit suing everyone to protect its investments, even the poor old Internet Archive, that one last bastion of general knowledge in an era of fake news and AI slop.

We had outages aplenty knocking down vast swathes of the web, so you couldn’t even use the thing for a day or so. That’s only going to get worse if nobody presses the hyperscalers on service quality, and with AI expected to drive a bandwidth blitz of 80 billion non-human web users (I’m talking about damn AI again, specifically agents).

Some countries are probably even instigating outages for reasons of mass control. Cloudflare has reported on government-directed internet shutdowns in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Panama this year. Also not helping: cable cuts, which affected services in the likes of Pakistan, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Syria, and Nepal, and power cuts affecting web service in Angola, Chile, Honduras, Cuba, Sri Lanka, and more.

We haven’t even got onto distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, with 8.3 million DDoS attacks happening just in the last quarter, reflecting a 40% year-over-year (YoY) increase, according to Cloudflare, again.

And last – and definitely least for everyone out there with high moral character – the U.K.’s Online Safety Act came into effect in August, which apparently makes it harder to access naughty websites online. And Imgur, which has decided to play it safe over the fact it may host a minuscule amount of risqué content and completely block U.K. access to its services.

Oh, and at one point, sub-reddits covering periods, quitting nicotine, and even beer drinking found themselves gated behind age checks.

Goodbye, then, to the internet. We hardly knew ye (well, we did, but perhaps we hardly do now).

- Giacomo Lee, News Editor

WINNER: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

OK, I know I asked you to hear me out earlier, but … hear me out … again.

HPE is somehow set to exit the year having both closed on its $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks and with the CEO that steered the company through that deal still in place.

These two accomplishments might not sound like that big of a deal in today’s corporate environment, but I bet you would have received pretty good odds on neither of those things happening at some point during the past 12 months.

Yet, somehow HPE is now Juniper Networks-infused, with just the small task of integrating those operations, and Neri – for the moment – remains head of what is a much larger company. A lot may change over the next 12 months, but that doesn’t change the fact that HPE was a big winner in 2025.

- Dan Meyer, Executive Editor

LOSER: Competition

The big getting bigger is an age-old adage, one that rode increased technology complexity in continuing to collect adages in 2025.

In my “winners” for this year, you will see my selection of both Broadcom and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Both of those selections were based on their respective abilities to close on and integrate acquisitions of a one-time industry-adjacent company in the case of the former, and a direct rival in the case of the latter.

I deemed both deals as great successes for the acquirer – and of course the stockholders of those being acquired – but both deals also highlighted the surging influx of might by large industry players.

On one hand, these deals can make sense for enterprise customers as these larger players can provide a simplified approach toward purchasing, deploying, and supporting increasingly complex technical solutions. But on the other hand, these deals remove choice from the market.

Luckily, the growing software-defined nature of our industry allows for a fairly low entry point toward driving new innovation and choice into the space. But this year did show a quick counter toward the long-term viability of those competitive choices.

- Dan Meyer, Executive Editor

Need more? Make sure to check out Pt. 1 and Pt. 3 of our winners and losers.