For the 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Awards, CRN staff evaluated and selected product finalists and winners across a broad range of IT categories including AI software and infrastructure, AI PCs, data and information management, enterprise networking, and multiple cybersecurity categories.
This wave of innovation is spread across the industry, from established IT giants to startups with breakthrough product ideas. IT vendors are rushing to develop new products and adapt their current product portfolios in the face of the AI tsunami, either to reap the advantages of adding AI capabilities or upgrade them to meet the new demands of AI systems.
With so many new and updated products creating opportunities for the channel, solution providers face a significant challenge in deciding which products they should add to their tech portfolios and build practices around.
To help solution providers identify products that are truly innovative and offer real value for their customers, the 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Awards showcase IT products that provide significant advances in IT – and partner growth opportunities – across a broad range of technologies.
The winners in the following slides were chosen by CRN staff across 30 product categories. Descriptions of the winning products and their innovations, including performance claims and statements of market positions, were provided by IT vendors and have been lightly edited by CRN for space and clarity.
Winner: Red Hat AI
Red Hat AI is a product and services portfolio that accelerates time to market and reduces the operational cost of delivering AI solutions across hybrid cloud environments. With Red Hat AI, organizations can efficiently tune small, fit-for-purpose models using enterprise-relevant data and deploy them flexibly wherever data resides.
Red Hat AI helps manage and monitor the lifecycle of both predictive and genAI models at scale, from single-server deployments to highly distributed platforms, powered by open-source technologies and a partner ecosystem that focuses on performance, stability and GPU support across various infrastructures.
The portfolio, which includes Red Hat Inference, Red Hat OpenShift AI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and now, Red Hat AI Enterprise, helps provide organizations that require governed, production-grade AI with consistent security, compliance, and operational controls across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
The Red Hat AI Enterprise “metal-to-agent” architecture is a big innovation in the Red Hat AI portfolio, offering a unified platform that spans from GPU-accelerated infrastructure through model inference, tuning, and lifecycle management to production agentic deployment.
Red Hat AI Enterprise bridges all layers under a single operational model, built on Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL, which are the same trusted infrastructure enterprises already use to operate at scale.
The introduction of Models-as-a-Service gives IT teams self-service access to privately hosted models via an API gateway, enabling on-demand internal AI with enterprise governance built in.
Combined with integrated NeMo Guardrails and distributed inference via LLM-ed, Red Hat AI Enterprise makes production-ready agentic AI operationally achievable.
Finalists:
DDN Horizon
F5 BIG-IP v21 for AI Data Delivery
NetApp AI Data Engine
Winner: HP ZGX Nano G1n
The HP ZGX Nano G1n is a compact, high-performance AI workstation, and the first system built on HP’s ZGX platform, to bring advanced AI development and inference directly to the desktop.
Powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, it supports models up to 200 billion parameters on a single system and can scale through linked devices or integrate with higher-performance systems such as the HP ZGX Fury. Preloaded with NVIDIA’s DGX software stack and supported by HP ZGX Toolkit (a free VS Code extension), it delivers a faster path from setup to first results.
Toolkit enables instant device discovery, streamlined SSH access, and an application library for open-source frameworks, automated model evaluation via Ollama, and streamlined local model serving with flexible export and deployment options.
The target market includes AI developers, enterprise teams, and research organizations, as well as regulated sectors requiring secure, offline AI capabilities in air-gapped environments.
The HP ZGX platform introduces a new model for deploying AI by bringing data center-class capabilities into a modular, on-prem environment. With Nano as its entry point and systems such as ZGX Fury extending performance, the platform enables organizations to scale AI from desktop development to production workloads without changing infrastructure.
ZGX is innovative not only for the compute, but for the developer on-ramp. Many competitors can claim a DGX software stack: HP differentiates with HP ZGX Toolkit which reduces setup friction and speeds adoption. Toolkit provides instant ZGX device discovery, simplified secure access, and an application library that equips developers with open-source frameworks, automated model evaluation via Ollama, and streamlined local model serving.
With easy export and flexible deployment options, teams reduce complexity and scale results seamlessly from workstation to cloud, while keeping sensitive data on-prem when needed.
Finalists:
Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514 (CPE584-1N)
Getac S510AD
HP EliteBoard G1a Next Gen AI PC
Winner: Dell AI Data Platform With Dell Orchestration Engine
The Dell AI Data Platform with Data Orchestration Engine builds on Dell’s leadership in infrastructure to deliver a unified system for AI data. It brings together high-performance storage, GPU-accelerated processing, and data orchestration to transform raw, siloed enterprise data into trusted, AI-ready assets.
The Data Orchestration Engine extends Dell AI Data Platform by automating the full AI data lifecycle – from discovery and labeling to enrichment and transformation of structured, unstructured, and multimodal data into governed datasets at scale. With a no-code/low-code approach, it enables both technical and business teams to operationalize AI pipelines faster.
Integrated with NVIDIA NIM microservices, AI Blueprints and a Marketplace of 200+ pre-built workflows, the platform accelerates time to production. GPU-accelerated analytics and vector processing deliver up to 12x faster indexing and 3x faster data preparation, forming the data foundation for the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA.
Most enterprise AI fails not because of models, but because of data. The Dell AI Data Platform solves this by transforming fragmented data pipelines into a unified, production-ready system.
At its core, the Data Orchestration Engine acts as a control layer across the full AI data lifecycle—automating ingestion, enrichment, labeling, and governance across heterogeneous environments. This eliminates siloed tools and manual workflows that slow AI adoption.
Unlike software-only approaches, Dell uniquely combines orchestration with integrated compute and built-in GPU acceleration using NVIDIA cuDF and cuVS, delivering up to 12x faster vector indexing and significantly faster data preparation directly within the data layer. The integrated Marketplace accelerates time to value with 200+ pre-built pipelines, NVIDIA NIM microservices, and AI Blueprints—enabling organizations to move from pilot to production in weeks, not months.
Finalists:
CrowdStrike Charlotte AI
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
Snowflake Cortex Code
Zoom Communications AI Companion 3.0
Winner: SmartBear BearQ
SmartBear BearQ is an agentic QA system that autonomously explores, tests, and validates applications. BearQ discovers user workflows, generates and maintains tests, and continuously validates application behavior as the application changes. It’s always-on agents, including the QA Lead Agent, Explorer Agent, and Tester Agent, act as QA teammates, expanding coverage and reducing the need for ongoing test maintenance. This enables teams to keep pace with AI-driven development while maintaining confidence in quality.
BearQ is designed for product engineering and QA teams at organizations that need to scale testing, remove bottlenecks, and ensure applications work as intended in fast-moving environments.
BearQ introduces a fundamentally new approach to software testing: autonomous QA. Instead of relying on predefined test cases or scripted automation, BearQ autonomously understands how an application behaves and validates it based on real user intent.
Its multi-agent system continuously explores, generates, executes, and maintains tests, eliminating the need for constant manual updates or script maintenance. This shifts QA from a static safety net to an adaptive system that evolves with the application.
As UI and workflows change, BearQ automatically updates coverage, preventing the common failure mode of broken or outdated tests. What makes BearQ truly innovative is its ability to operate as an always-on system of quality validation. It doesn’t just automate tasks; it manages the testing lifecycle, enabling teams to keep pace with AI-driven development and dramatically expand coverage.
Finalists:
Launch Darkly Platform
Sonar SonarQube
Winner: Dynatrace Intelligence
Dynatrace Intelligence is an AI-powered observability platform that combines grounded data with agentic AI that can reason and take action, allowing teams to detect issues, identify root causes and automate remediation. The platform empowers organizations to build more resilient applications, elevate customer experiences, and drive autonomous action across modern digital ecosystems.
Dynatrace Intelligence is built for large enterprises and digital-native organizations operating complex, cloud-native and AI-driven environments with mature DevOps and SRE practices, and for enterprises seeking to move from traditional monitoring to automated, autonomous operations at scale across hybrid and multi-cloud systems.
Dynatrace Intelligence moves observability beyond insight generation into trusted, autonomous action by combining two historically separate approaches: deterministic, causality-based AI – grounded in real-time system data and dependency mapping – and emerging agentic AI that can reason and take action. This allows the platform to not just detect and diagnose issues, but to predict, decide, and remediate them in real time within defined guardrails, closing the loop from observability to automation.
Through the platform’s use of Grail, a unified data lakehouse, and Smartscape, a real-time topology map and graph that provides a visual representation of full-stack relationships, the platform can reduce hallucinations and increase reliability, providing a step toward autonomous operations rather than traditional reactive monitoring.
Finalists
New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform
Zscaler Digital Experience Network Intelligence
Winner: Cohesity Gaia
Cohesity Gaia on‑premises extends Cohesity Gaia’s AI‑driven knowledge discovery capabilities to environments where data must remain on‑premises for security, compliance, or performance reasons. While organizations are eager to adopt AI, much of their most valuable unstructured data is stored in on‑prem backup systems, putting it out of reach for analytics and AI initiatives. Gaia on‑prem allows enterprises to search and extract insights from this protected data without moving it to the cloud or introducing new governance risk.
Built on the Cohesity Data Cloud and powered by NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Gaia on‑prem helps organizations turn existing backup data into a usable source of insight, supporting research, analysis, and operational decision‑making while maintaining full control over data access and locality.
Cohesity Gaia on‑premises is innovative because it makes backup data usable for AI‑driven knowledge discovery. Historically, backup environments were designed solely for recovery, leaving years of historical enterprise data inaccessible to analytics and AI systems. Gaia changes this by enabling AI to search, retrieve, and summarize historical backup data directly where it resides, without expanding the governance surface.
Gaia is also designed to operate safely at enterprise scale. Semantic search ensures that AI retrieves contextually relevant information rather than indiscriminate result sets, while multilingual indexing allows global teams to work with data without external translation or data movement. Sensitive data redaction and permission‑aware responses enforce governance at query time.
Together, these capabilities transform backup environments from passive insurance into trusted, AI‑ready sources of enterprise intelligence.
Finalist:
Hydrolix Bot Insights
Winner: VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0
VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 is an AI-native private cloud platform that delivers infrastructure at the speed of developers while maintaining enterprise control, security, and cost transparency.
Designed for organizations running on mission-critical workloads across hybrid environments, VCF 9.0 enables AI and traditional applications to operate together within a single operating model. By bringing together public cloud agility and on-premises performance, it reduces reliance on separate infrastructure stacks and fragmented toolchains.
VCF 9.0 unifies compute, storage, networking, automation, and security into one platform and delivers: AI-ready infrastructure with integrated GPU support and model services Self-service, GitOps-driven automation with built-in governance, fleet-wide lifecycle management and observability from a single interface, and built-in sovereign security, compliance, and cyber resilience. It offers measurable cost efficiency, including up to 38 percent lower memory/server TCO and 34 percent lower storage TCO.
Enterprises increasingly need to support traditional, cloud-native, and AI workloads, but most environments still rely on fragmented infrastructure, multiple tools, and inconsistent operational models. This creates unnecessary complexity, higher costs, and slower delivery.
VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 addresses this by consolidating infrastructure into a single, unified private cloud platform. It integrates compute, storage, networking, automation, and security into one control plane with consistent APIs, shared policies, and built-in lifecycle management.
Key innovations include: A unified operations and automation experience that removes the need for separate management tools; a single platform supporting VMs, containers, and AI workloads side by side; integrated lifecycle capabilities such as patching, upgrades, certificate management and compliance; and built-in governance and cost visibility for improved operational control.
By reducing fragmentation and standardizing operations, VCF 9.0 enables organizations to modernize infrastructure without introducing additional complexity.
Finalist:
Cloudaware Cloud Management Platform
Winner: Qumulo Data Platform
Qumulo Data Platform is a software-defined file data platform that enables organizations to store, manage, and access massive volumes of unstructured data across on-premises, edge, and public cloud environments.
It delivers high-performance file storage with real-time visibility, analytics, and automation, allowing teams to monitor capacity, performance, and data usage as they scale. The platform supports hybrid and multi-cloud workflows, simplifies data mobility, and provides built-in data protection features such as snapshots and replication for resiliency.
Qumulo is designed for data-intensive industries—including media and entertainment, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, and research organizations—as well as enterprises running AI/ML and high-performance computing workloads. Its target users are IT, infrastructure, and data teams that need scalable, flexible, and cloud-integrated file storage to support modern, distributed applications and workflows.
The most recent evolution of the Qumulo Data Platform, centered on its Cloud Data Fabric, is innovative in how it eliminates traditional boundaries between data locations and workloads. It creates a single global file system that unifies on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments, enabling real-time read/write access to the same data everywhere without replication.
Recent innovations extend this with AI-driven capabilities, including autonomous data management and optimized data delivery to GPU-based AI workloads, improving performance and reducing manual intervention. The platform also introduces intelligent data movement and prefetching, allowing data to be streamed or positioned where needed before workloads run, dramatically reducing latency and accelerating global collaboration.
Together, these advancements transform file storage into a real-time, AI-ready data fabric, enabling enterprises to operate at exabyte scale with greater agility, efficiency, and global accessibility.
Finalists:
Datadobi StorageMAP Storage Optimizer
YugabyteDB
Winner: Commvault Cloud
As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and data estates become more distributed, enterprises require unified security solutions that reduce operational friction while strengthening protection. The recent launch of the Commvault Cloud Unity platform – one of the most substantive platform releases in the company’s history – represents a major step forward in cloud security and cyber resilience.
The platform unifies data security, cyber recovery, and identity resilience into a single integrated experience spanning cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Commvault Cloud is designed to deliver AI-powered data protection, proactive threat detection, advanced ransomware recovery, and a single operational view across enterprise environments. The platform goes beyond data recovery to enable continuous business operations at enterprise scale, helping organizations resume operations quickly, securely, and with confidence following cyber incidents.
Customers across verticals have access to tailored solutions that address their specific needs:
-Federal government: Following an outage or cyberattack, Commvault Cloud can help federal institutions rebuild and restore critical cloud-based government applications to enable continuous operations.
-Financial services: With Commvault Cloud, customers can protect financial data with automated, policy-driven solutions that help ensure regulatory compliance and data security.
-Healthcare: Healthcare providers can meet HIPAA compliance and protect patient data with advanced backup, recovery, and encryption solutions.
-Education: Commvault Cloud can help secure educational data with scalable, cost-effective protection solutions designed for institutions of all sizes.
Finalists:
Cohesity RecoveryAgent
ControlMonkey
HYCU R-Shield
Object First Ootbi Mini
Veeam Data Platform v13
Winner: Zscaler Cellular
Zscaler Cellular brings Zero Trust security to cellular-connected IoT and OT devices through a simple SIM-based approach. By inserting a Zscaler Cellular SIM into a device—without adding software or VPNs—organizations can connect securely to cellular networks worldwide while isolating each device on its own “private island.” Every packet is routed through the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, delivering continuous visibility into device behavior and granular, real-time policy enforcement at the network edge.
Security teams can detect and stop risky activity (e.g., unexpected foreign connections), restrict usage by country/region, and block anomalous access attempts before traffic reaches the internet or private apps. Target customers include enterprises and public-sector organizations securing smart infrastructure, industrial systems, logistics, retail, and other large-scale cellular IoT/OT deployments.
Zscaler Cellular is innovative because it extends Zero Trust into the cellular layer—not just the enterprise network—by embedding policy enforcement directly in the cellular backplane.
A simple SIM insertion provides instant, global, secure connectivity across 500-plus telecom networks in 180-plus countries, with no software agents, VPNs, or device configuration required. Each SIM is treated as a first-class identity in the Zero Trust framework, enabling per-device isolation (“private island”), dramatically reducing attack surface and limiting blast radius.
Because all traffic is inspected and governed end-to-end, organizations gain consistent, bi-directional protection plus real-time visibility and granular control for IoT/OT and other hard-to-manage devices—especially those operating outside traditional perimeter controls. This brings Zero Trust policy to “anything connected,” anywhere, with the simplicity and scalability required for massive cellular deployments.
Finalists:
Asimily Cyber Asset & Exposure Management Platform
Ericsson Cradlepoint R2400
Scale Computing Fleet Manager (SC//Fleet Manager) edge orchestration solutions
Winner: NetBrain Next-Gen R12
NetBrain is an agentic NetOps platform that accelerates how network operations teams discover, diagnose, remediate, change, and assess their networks across hybrid and multi-vendor environments. Built on a discovery and automation engine, NetBrain augments engineers with the context, intelligence, and automated workflows needed to resolve problems faster and prevent outages before they occur.
Its core capabilities include:
• Agentic troubleshooting — automated diagnostics, agentic deep diagnosis, runbook execution, and auto-remediation,
• Change management — pre/post change validation and compliance enforcement,
• Continuous assessment — proactive network health, performance, lifecycle, usage, security validation, and risk detection.
NetBrain targets enterprise IT and network operations teams, as well as managed service providers, managing large-scale, complex infrastructure who want to shift from reactive, labor-intensive troubleshooting to proactive, intelligence-driven network operations.
NetBrain’s Next-Gen Release 12.3 is highly innovative because it shifts network operations from manual, reactive troubleshooting to a proactive, closed-loop Agentic NetOps model.
Unlike traditional AI assistants that merely retrieve information or suggest fixes, NetBrain’s agentic AI can interpret goals, reason over complex live data, and generate explainable, multi-step diagnostic plans while keeping engineers in control of execution. This intelligence is grounded in a live digital twin and codified goals of the network, providing continuously updated visibility across traditional, cloud, and Kubernetes environments.
The release also introduces governed AI boundaries, ensuring the AI operates within safe, human-defined limits. It investigates, reasons, and recommends — but cannot remediate without engineer approval. This preserves full audit trails and accountability while dramatically accelerating resolution times.
Together, these capabilities allow engineers and AI to safely collaborate, reducing mean time to resolution and preventing outages without sacrificing control or governance.
Finalists:
Auvik IT Management
Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT Expert
Fleet – Premium
OpenGear CM8000 Console Server
Xurrent ITxM Platform
Winner: Cavelo Flash
Cavelo is redefining risk posture assessments as a business driver by modernizing, streamlining and unifying the process, making it faster, easier, and more cost-effective for service providers to assess and communicate insights and tangible recommendations. Cavelo Flash acts as a strategic business lever, giving emerging MSPs a simple, low-friction way to enter the cybersecurity risk space.
As customers demand faster, measurable insights, Flash delivers a prospecting tool that helps providers demonstrate value, win and retain business.
Traditionally, MSPs and MSSPs have relied on a patchwork of technologies and third-party services — from penetration tests to vulnerability scans and risk scorecards — to establish risk baselines when engaging new customers. The process is often fragmented, resource-heavy, and slow, leaving results outdated almost as soon as they’re delivered. Smaller providers in particular struggle to compete in this space due to high costs and operational complexity.
Through speed to value, Cavelo Flash becomes a strategic business lever — not just a point tool or service.
Finalists:
Atera: Robin by Atera
ControlUp For MSPs
Inforcer Copilot Readiness Assessment and Copilot Manager
WatchGuard FireCloud Total Access
Winner: Zayo DynamicLink
Enterprise networks face unprecedented pressure from AI workloads, distributed workforces, and multi-cloud adoption. Traditional connectivity models were not designed for the level of scale, complexity, or volatility of today’s business environment. Enterprises need networks that can adapt in real time without sacrificing control for visibility.
DynamicLink is Zayo’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform that transforms how enterprises connect, protect, and operate their network across core, cloud, and edge environments. Through a self-service portal, enterprises now have the power to turn up, scale, and configure their network connectivity services in minutes rather than days. These capabilities span Zayo’s entire network footprint, the largest independent network provider in North America, with 28,000 on-net enterprise locations and 1,200+ data centers.
With built-in security, observability, and an AI interface, DynamicLink provides enterprises with true network agility at scale, aligning network performance directly with evolving business needs.
As AI workloads and massive data volumes accelerate, legacy networks can no longer keep pace with the speed of business. While NaaS was intended to address this gap, most solutions have fallen short, with limited reach, partial automation, and basic observability.
DynamicLink’s NaaS solution aligns with Gartner’s definition of true NaaS, offering a standardized, automated, self-service platform with dynamic scaling. DynamicLink’s innovation lies in its ability to simplify and unify enterprise network operations. Rather than relying on disconnected tools and manual workflows, it brings together core network functions, such as connectivity, security, observability, and intelligence, into a single platform with real-time control. DynamicLink delivers greater reach, broader capabilities, and an industry-first AI-powered assistant. It transforms connectivity from static infrastructure into a dynamic and software-defined experience, giving organizations real-time control to turn up, scale, and manage their networks.
Finalist:
Lantronix SISPM1242-582-LRT Managed PoE++ Switch
Winner: Auvik Network Management
Auvik is a cloud-based IT management platform that empowers IT teams to proactively manage diverse networks, security devices, endpoints, and SaaS applications. Auvik manages one million network devices and three million SaaS applications across 100,000 networks and provides monitoring services for more than 10 million devices.
In September 2025, Auvik introduced Smart Alert Suppression within Auvik Network Management (ANM) to reduce alert noise and deliver more precise and actionable insights. Paired with Auvik’s leading network mapping capabilities enhanced throughout 2025, Smart Alert Suppression brings added clarity to network outages, eliminating redundant alerts related to downstream devices and giving technicians more relevant topology insights than ever before.
In March 2026, Auvik further expanded ANM with High Availability (HA) Pair Monitoring for active/passive firewall pairs, ensuring complete visibility and data continuity across both devices. A dedicated HA Pair widget provides at-a-glance insights into each firewall’s health, sync state, and role.
As IT environments become increasingly complex with expanding Shadow AI and shifting work models, IT teams face mounting pressure to manage their networks with limited resources. These added capabilities to ANM directly address these challenges by reducing noise and streamlining IT visibility.
Smart Alert Suppression helps reduce alert noise by preventing cascading alerts when a parent device (e.g., core switch or firewall) goes offline. Using Auvik’s real-time network topology map, it automatically understands downstream dependencies and suppresses related alerts, so IT teams can focus on the root cause. HA Pair Monitoring closes a critical visibility gap in environments with firewall redundancy.
These enhanced visibility and alerting capabilities help MSPs stay ahead of issues and manage infrastructure with greater confidence.
Finalists:
SOLiD BARS
Zyxel Networks XMG2230 Series 28/52-port GbE 2.5G L3 Access Switch with 4 10G Uplink
Winner: Eaton 9PX G2 Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
The Eaton 9PX G2 UPS is a next‑generation online double conversion UPS delivering high‑efficiency, high‑density power protection for distributed IT, edge computing, and mission‑critical environments. The product introduces significant innovation through its combination of higher power density, advanced battery intelligence, and built in cybersecurity.
Built on Eaton’s proven 9PX platform, the 9PX G2 provides more usable power in less rack space, enhanced battery management, and certified cybersecurity to support modern IT infrastructures. Available in 3–11 kVA models with rack or tower configurations, the 9PX G2 supports network closets, server rooms, data centers, and AI-at-the-edge deployments. Features include true online double conversion technology, hot‑swappable batteries, internal bypass, and optional maintenance bypass to help prevent downtime. Each unit includes a Gigabit network card with market‑leading cybersecurity, enabling secure remote monitoring, management, and firmware updates through Eaton software solutions.
Designed for easy deployment and long‑term reliability, the 9PX G2 maximizes uptime while reducing operating costs and total cost of ownership.
Using wide bandgap technology, the 9PX G2 delivers more output power in fewer rack units, allowing organizations to support more IT equipment while freeing valuable space. Select models deliver full performance in just 4U, down from 6U.
Eaton’s new Advanced Battery Management Plus (ABM+) technology enhances predictive analytics to more accurately determine battery health and replacement timing, reducing both unexpected downtime and unnecessary battery replacements.
Additionally, every 9PX G2 ships with a cybersecure Gigabit network card, enabling secure remote monitoring, fleet wide firmware updates, and simplified management without requiring add on hardware or service contracts.
These innovations collectively improve efficiency, resilience, and manageability, making the 9PX G2 a forward looking power protection solution for today’s distributed and edge focused IT environments.
Finalist:
CyberPower PowerPanel Cloud Pro
Winner: Cyera AI Security Platform
Cyera’s AI Security Platform secures sensitive data in cloud and AI-driven environments, where traditional controls often fail. As AI operates at machine speed, Cyera provides continuous, real-time visibility into data location, access permissions, and usage across both human and automated systems.
Over the past year, Cyera has launched a suite of new capabilities including AI Guardian, Browser Shield, Data Lineage, and Cyera MCP to close critical security gaps. These updates automatically map AI assets, proactively identify risks, and enforce real-time guardrails to prevent data leakage.
By providing deeper visibility and automated protection, Cyera ensures enterprises can embrace the AI era while keeping their proprietary assets protected without compromising operational velocity.
Cyera’s latest updates address the urgent security needs of enterprises scaling agentic AI. Launched in August 2025, AI Guardian utilizes a dual-layered system—combining AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM) with AI Runtime Protection—to discover shadow AI and catalog assets. By mapping model interactions with sensitive data, it enforces real-time guardrails and least-privileged access.
At RSAC 2026, Cyera introduced capabilities targeting two major blind spots: ungoverned browser prompts and autonomous agent activity. Browser Shield and Data Lineage provide proactive protection by blocking sensitive leaks into public models while establishing audit trails for autonomous actions. Additionally, Cyera MCP simplifies risk management, enabling security teams to use natural language to query threats and generate visual dashboards.
By correlating identity, data sensitivity, and AI intent, Cyera shifts data protection from static policies to continuous, operational control, allowing organizations to scale AI innovation securely.
Finalists:
Cato AI Security
Exabeam Agent Behavior Analytics
Netskope One AI Security
Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS
Zscaler AI Protect
Winner: Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud 2.0
Cortex Cloud 2.0 is an industry-leading Agentic CNAPP designed to scale defense across complex multi-cloud environments and shifts the industry from manual reactivity to agentic autonomy.
By seamlessly merging Cloud-Native Application Protection (CNAPP) with Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), it protects the entire lifecycle from code development to runtime.
The platform unifies code, cloud, and SOC telemetry into a single, unbroken workflow, eliminating the silos and communication gaps that traditionally stall critical security actions. Its native autonomous AI agents investigate and act within enterprise guardrails, delivering real-time protection from the workload to the network edge.
Targeted at Global 2000 enterprises and high-velocity DevSecOps teams, Cortex Cloud 2.0 allows organizations to do more than just see risk—it enables them to eliminate it autonomously. This transition from manual triage to agentic resolution significantly cuts Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR), ensuring security keeps pace with AI-driven development.
While version 1.0 unified CDR and CNAPP, Cortex Cloud 2.0 introduces an autonomous AI workforce trained on over 1.2 billion real-world security responses. These agents don’t just alert, but they also investigate, calculate blast radius, and execute the least-disruptive fixes in minutes.
The update also introduces a performance-optimized architecture that solves the traditional trade-off between security and speed. A new, one-click “optimized mode” for its CDR agent slashes compute overhead by 50 percent, enabling deep visibility on performance-sensitive workloads that were previously unmonitorable.
Additionally, the update bridges the gap between development and operations through the ASPM Command Center, providing developers with intelligent blocking of insecure code and one-click fixes in their IDEs. This “Code-to-Cloud-to-SOC” integration creates a unified security ecosystem that drastically reduces Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) without slowing down development velocity.
Finalists:
Armis Centrix for Application Security
CrowdStrike Falcon Shield
Terra Security Terra Platform
ThreatLocker Zero Trust Cloud Access
Zscaler Zero Trust Cloud
Winner: CrowdStrike Falcon Data Security
CrowdStrike Falcon Data Security is a new data security solution that stops data theft across the agentic enterprise. Powered by real-world adversary intelligence and unified Falcon platform context, Falcon Data Security discovers, classifies, and stops data theft in real time, whether caused by an employee mistake, a malicious insider, or an adversary operating with valid credentials.
Key features include AI-powered classification that identifies and tracks sensitive data in motion across endpoints, SaaS, cloud, browsers, and AI workflows. GenAI data protection prevents exposure across managed and unmanaged tools, while real-time cloud visibility surfaces cloud data risk.
Unified platform context evaluates data threats alongside endpoint, identity, and cloud activity, giving teams user, device, and access context in a single console to correlate, prioritize, and stop threats faster. Automated enforcement blocks risky data movement at endpoint egress, prevents unauthorized access in SaaS applications, and automates cloud data response actions through unified SOAR workflows.
AI is reshaping how work gets done, accessing and moving sensitive data continuously across endpoints, cloud services, SaaS applications, and AI-driven workflows.
Legacy data protection was built for a different era – DLP for static endpoints, DSPM for point-in-time cloud inventories. Neither was designed to look at data security holistically as sensitive information moves from one domain to another. Modern data security requires real-time, cross-domain context and adversary intelligence to distinguish legitimate data movement from real risk – preventing inadvertent exposure, leakage, and theft wherever data resides.
The Falcon platform’s unified architecture spanning identity, endpoint, SaaS, cloud, and AI – combined with native adversary intelligence – gives teams the context to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data across systems. By consolidating fragmented DLP and DSPM tools, Falcon Data Security simplifies protection and secures the full data spectrum.
Finalists:
Concentric AI Semantic DLP
Cribl Guard
Drata Agentic TPRM Assessment
NetApp Ransomware Resilience
Sentra AI Data Readiness for Google Workspace Gemini and Microsoft Copilot
Winner: Abnormal AI Phishing Coach
AI Phishing Coach is an AI-native security awareness training (SAT) platform designed to reduce human-driven cybersecurity risk.
Instead of using generic templates or manually curated content, it uses behavioral AI to analyze real phishing attacks and tailor simulations to each employee’s role, communication patterns, and historical risk. When users engage with simulated messages, the platform delivers immediate, AI-powered coaching that explains what was missed and how to improve.
Since October 16, 2025 Abnormal has rolled out major new feature releases including: credential phishing simulations that detect true credential exposure risk, business and vendor email compromise simulations that mimic real-world fraud scenarios, multi-language video training for global accessibility, and executive dashboard and continuous phishing risk scoring to provide ongoing visibility into human risk and program effectiveness.
AI Phishing Coach is built for security leaders seeking a scalable, automated way to improve security awareness and defend against increasingly sophisticated social engineering attacks.
AI Phishing Coach replaces one-size-fits-all training with adaptive, behavior-driven learning powered entirely by AI. Employees are trained on the threats they are most likely to encounter—such as wire fraud scenarios for finance teams or credential harvesting attacks for engineers—making training more relevant, engaging, and effective at driving lasting behavior change.
Just-in-time, generative AI coaching creates durable behavior change that traditional quarterly or annual training cannot achieve. When an employee interacts with a simulated message, the system immediately delivers personalized feedback explaining what signals were missed and how to respond differently next time.
Equally transformative is its autonomy: AI Phishing Coach runs end-to-end without human intervention, generating content, adjusting difficulty, aligning with CIS and NIST standards, and reporting automatically. This shifts security awareness from a manual compliance exercise into a continuously improving AI system—marking a fundamental departure from legacy SAT platforms.
Finalists:
Barracuda Email Protection
Mimecast Email Security, API-Based Protection
Proofpoint 365 Total Protection Plan 4-AI Cyber Assistant (AI.MY)
Sublime Email Security Platform
ThreatDown Email Security
Winner: Arctic Wolf Aurora Endpoint Security
Aurora Endpoint Security is Arctic Wolf’s next-generation endpoint security portfolio, powered by Aurora AI and built on the Aurora Superintelligence Platform.
Aurora Endpoint Security delivers advanced threat protection, detection, and response directly at the endpoint through a cloud-native portfolio that includes our endpoint protection platform, endpoint detection and response, ransomware resilience, and mobile threat defense with flexible managed service options.
By leveraging insights from over 10,000 customers and 10 trillion security observations a week on average, Aurora Endpoint Security enables proactive threat prevention, rapid detection, and consistent response at scale. It is designed for organizations of all sizes seeking enterprise-grade protection.
With battle-proven, AI-powered endpoint security that boasts a 99-percent true positive rate, protection against zero-day threats, a 90-percent reduction in alert fatigue, and 30 percent faster incident investigations, on average, customers achieve more than 13x ROI, eliminate thousands of hours of manual effort, and reduce operational burden through AI-driven automation and efficiency.
Aurora Endpoint Security is innovative because it’s built on the Arctic Wolf SuperIntelligence Platform, enabling customers to benefit from the open-XDR architecture of the company’s platform and the agentic SOC capabilities we can unlock for our customers. It brings AI-driven prediction, prevention, detection, response, and smart rollback together within a single cloud-native portfolio powered by Aurora AI and the Aurora Superintelligence Platform.
By leveraging insights from over 10,000 customers and 10 trillion security observations a week on average, Aurora AI is able to identify and block emerging threats pre-execution, including zero-day attacks, while continuously refining detection accuracy. This results in a 99 percent true positive rate, 90 percent reduction in alert fatigue, and significantly faster investigations.
Unlike traditional endpoint security, Aurora Endpoint Security is tightly integrated with Arctic Wolf’s agentic SOC and expert analysts, enabling human-validated, AI-orchestrated defense. This combination of automation, real-world SOC expertise, and continuous learning delivers proactive, adaptive defense.
Finalists:
Action1 Platform
HENNGE Endpoint & Managed Security
WatchGuard Endpoint Security Prime
Winner: 1Password Unified Access
Most organizations aren’t prepared for what happens after AI agents log in. Unlike human access, which is authenticated once, agents use credentials continuously, operating across devices, tools, and workflows that often sit outside the visibility of traditional identity systems. The result is a growing gap between where access is granted and where it’s actually used.
1Password Unified Access is a new agent security platform, providing a centralized control plane to govern access across human, AI agent, and machine identities, enforcing security at the point of use, not just at login. Built on a “discover, secure, audit” model, it enables teams to uncover agent activity, secure and govern credentials in a unified vault, and gain visibility into how access is used over time. Designed for businesses of all sizes, Unified Access integrates into developer tools and workflows, creating new opportunities for partners to deliver modern identity security as customers adopt AI.
Most security tools are built on the assumption that once a user logs in, trust is established. In environments shaped by AI agents and automated workflows, that assumption breaks down. The real risk lies in how credentials and secrets are created, shared, and used after authentication, often outside the visibility of traditional identity systems.
Building on 1Password’s strong adoption among developers, Unified Access operates on developer machines and local environments where credentials are most at risk. Its innovative, endpoint-native approach allows teams to discover agent activity and insecure secrets at the source, enforce policy at the moment access occurs, and capture every action with full context and attribution.
Unified Access also reflects a fundamental shift in identity. By extending governance to AI agents and machine workloads, the identity security platform addresses a rapidly growing attack surface, giving partners a differentiated way to secure modern, AI-driven operations.
Finalists:
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security
Delinea Platform With Iris AI
JumpCloud AI & SaaS Management
Orchid Security Identity-First Security Orchestration
Silverfort Identity Security Platform
Winner: Cynet CyAI
Cynet’s proprietary AI engine powers the Cynet AI Security Operations Center (AI SOC), combining autonomous threat detection with expert human validation. Built into Cynet’s unified cybersecurity platform, CyAI analyzes signals across endpoints, identities, users, networks, cloud environments, email, SaaS, and mobile to identify 97 percent of threats before they execute and remediate 90 percent automatically.
The engine correlates telemetry across the environment, prioritizes alerts with contextual playbooks, and automatically stops threats in under a second. CyAI works alongside Cynet’s 24×7 CyOps team of security experts who validate alerts, apply business context, and guide remediation.
The platform is delivered through a global network of MSPs and resellers that need to provide enterprise-grade protection for thousands of small and mid-market businesses without building a full internal SOC. It enables partners to deliver advanced detection and response capabilities while simplifying operations and improving security outcomes for customers.
Cynet completely redesigned CyAI from the ground up in 2025, transforming it from early development to a production-grade detection engine trained on millions of real-world threat samples.
The team made CyAI self-learning, so that every time it analyzes a file on an endpoint, the results—detection, miss, or false positive—are sent back to the cloud to continuously retrain and improve the model. It also includes built-in model explainability, meaning CyAI doesn’t just detect threats, but explains what it found and why. This opens the black box of AI and helps CyOps analysts make faster, more confident decisions.
The results: CyAI began catching previously undetected malware in active customer incidents that no other antivirus mechanism had flagged, often spotting them first in the wild. At launch, it doubled Cynet’s malware detection success rates and reduced customer false positives by 90 percent.
Finalists:
Arctic Wolf Managed Detection And Response
CrowdStrike Falcon Complete
Expel Managed SIEM
Winner: Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA)
When quantum computers become available by 2030, traditional cryptographic algorithms (RSA, ECC – Elliptical Curve Cryptography) are at risk of being broken.
Zscaler’s Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Inspection seamlessly decrypts and inspects quantum-encrypted traffic, defends against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. PQC Visibility provides reporting and logging that empowers customers to meet compliance mandates, and gain visibility into PQC traffic across apps and services.
Security teams need visibility and control of post-quantum encrypted traffic—and Zscaler’s leading security service edge (SSE) is now quantum-ready. Zscaler’s decryption and deep inspection of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) traffic detects and stops threats hiding behind new quantum encryption algorithms. Inspecting PQC traffic means organizations can defend against future quantum attacks like “store now, decrypt later” and know what quantum ciphers are traversing your environment.
From client software like browsers and key third-party services, customers gain the visibility necessary for regulatory compliance audits so they can meet regulatory mandates and maintain uninterrupted business operations everywhere.
Zscaler’s implementation of PQC traffic decryption and inspection ensures data security and compliance with evolving industry standards—and empowers customers to become quantum-ready in a transparent and friction-free way.
Finalists:
Armis Centrix For Vulnerability Management Detection And Response
QuSecure QuProtect R3
Nozomi Networks Vantage IQ
Winner: ThreatLocker Zero Trust Network Access
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) with ThreatLocker is an innovative approach to securing connectivity that ensures only authorized users on approved devices can access specific internal resources. ThreatLocker ZTNA shifts access verification to the device level, allowing administrators to define exactly who can access what, based on user identity, device, and context. Network access is managed through a secure broker that verifies access privileges without the need for inbound ports or exposing client networks to the internet.
Whether users are in the office, traveling, or working remotely, they experience seamless access while your network remains locked down.
ZTNA is a new offering from ThreatLocker. What sets it apart from other capabilities on the market is the speedy access that can be maintained for trusted users from anywhere in the world, just like being in-office. To ensure the solution keeps pace with the business, ThreatLocker developed a proprietary protocol to manage communication between the network, broker, and endpoints.
Finalists:
Lumu Defender
Palo Alto Networks Prisma Browser For Business
Winner: Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange
The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange securely connects users and IoT/OT devices to cloud/SaaS/AI applications based on zero trust principles using least privileged adaptive access. It enables organizations to embrace digital transformation, reduce cost and complexity from legacy firewalls and SD-WAN, and greatly reduce cyber risk exposure.
Using a purpose-built cloud platform delivered from 150+ PoPs globally, Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange delivers comprehensive cyber threat protection and data security for all users, devices and applications regardless of location or networks. Unlike traditional MPLS and SD-WAN, which enable lateral movement, the Zero Trust Exchange segments all entities by default, greatly reducing the risk of cyberattacks like ransomware. Zscaler’s unique zero trust architecture enables organizations to safely embrace a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework and realize operational savings.
Zscaler delivers a differentiated Zero Trust SASE solution by combining the company’s industry-leading SSE platform with its innovative Zero Trust Branch solution to connect and segment everything. Zero Trust Branch connects branches, campuses and factories through a proxy architecture which ensures that every connection can be inspected for threats and data loss.
Furthermore, Zscaler’s innovative segmentation technology isolates every endpoint and device within a branch into a “network-of-one.” This ensures that malware cannot move laterally and threats remain contained.
Finalists:
Cato SASE Platform
Cloudflare Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) For Post-Quantum (PQ)
Versa VersaONE Universal SASE Platform
Winner: CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM
CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is accelerating adoption of the Falcon platform as the operating system of cybersecurity. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM has proven itself a scaled market disruptor, delivering performance, ease of deployment, and cost advantages that set it apart from legacy competitors, while agentic workflows power the SOC of the future.
Built for organizations of all sizes and industries, Falcon Next-Gen SIEM ingests and correlates third-party data with the industry’s richest set of security data resident on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, alongside threat intelligence and AI-driven analytics built on years of stopping real-world attacks for rapid threat detection and response. Its hyper-scalable, index-free architecture enables real-time search at petabyte scale, with customer results showing up to 150x faster investigations with 80 percent cost savings versus legacy SIEM.
Falcon Next-Gen SIEM delivers detection efficacy and cost efficiency to redefine modern SIEM and accelerate agentic SOC transformation. Recent innovations include:
-Streamlined onboarding and third-party integrations: Falcon Onum real-time data pipelines eliminate onboarding friction while delivering up to 5x faster streaming, 50 percent lower storage costs, 70 percent faster incident response, and 40 percent less ingestion overhead.
-Federated search across distributed data stores extends flexible access to external data sources.
-Third-party indicator management enables ingestion and operationalization of external indicators of compromise.
-Extended open security architecture: Falcon Next-Gen SIEM now ingests and correlates Microsoft Defender for Endpoint telemetry, enabling Microsoft endpoint customers to modernize SecOps without deploying additional sensors.
-Cloud-native scale and flexibility (AWS): Enhances deployment and pricing flexibility to support large-scale, modern SecOps.
-Agentic workflows: AI agents including search analysis, correlation rule generation, data transformation, workflow generation, and Query Translation automate time-intensive SIEM workflows to eliminate manual effort and accelerate outcomes.
Finalists:
7AI Agentic Security Platform
Arctic Wolf Aurora Superintelligence Platform
Command Zero Custom Questions
Zscaler Agentic Security Operations Platform
Winner: ESET Threat Intelligence
ESET Threat Intelligence delivers curated, real-world intelligence that helps organizations and service providers anticipate and defend against modern cyberattacks. The platform offers in-depth APT reports, AI-powered analysis, and proprietary intelligence feeds covering ransomware, botnets, cryptoscams, smishing, IoCs, and more.
In 2026, ESET expanded its CTI offering with eCrime Reports, available in two tiers, focused on financially motivated attacks, including ransomware and infostealer ecosystems.
Supported by 11 R&D centers and global threat hunters, ESET is a trusted intelligence partner for the channel. Enhanced with ESET AI Advisor, ESET enables organizations to prioritize risk, accelerate incident response, and reduce data breach impact with highly actionable insights.
ESET’s threat intelligence serves businesses of all sizes, critical infrastructure, and government agencies. With continuous updates and low false-positives, ESET provides organizations with the intelligence needed to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats.
eCrime Reports represent a significant opportunity for MSSPs/VARs to increase their customers’ cyber defenses. Going beyond raw feeds that indicate what to block, eCrime Reports tell the full story of an attack. They offer qualitative, incident-driven intelligence that details who is behind an attack, how it unfolds, and why it succeeds.
eCrime Reports give MSSPs and security teams visibility into the entire attack lifecycle, from entry to extortion, including the affiliates operating behind the scenes. In today’s ransomware-as-a-service landscape, understanding the specific actors targeting an organization is critical to understanding the malware itself.
Each report links tactics, tooling, and real-world campaigns while highlighting common gaps that attackers exploit. This includes practical defense recommendations, configuration guidance, and hunting rules tied directly to observed attacks.
For channel partners, the outcome is the ability to upsell existing customers, anticipate attacks, and educate clients as part of a higher-value service offering.
Finalists:
ArmorCode AI Exposure Management (AIEM)
Dataminr For Cyber Defense
Tenable One AI Exposure
Winner: VDURA Data Platform V12
The VDURA Data Platform V12 is a software-defined, enterprise storage platform purpose-built for AI and high-performance computing workloads.
Built on the HYDRA architecture, V12 combines the speed of a true parallel file system with the resilience and cost-efficiency of object storage in a single global namespace.
V12 solves the three structural problems holding back AI infrastructure: GPU stalls from storage bottlenecks, metadata serialization at scale, and volatile all-flash economics.
Key V12 capabilities include an elastic metadata engine that dynamically scales across nodes for up to 20x improvement in metadata operations, instantaneous snapshot support for AI pipeline checkpoints and operational recovery, and SMR HDD optimization that unlocks 25–30 percent more capacity per rack without compromising throughput. V12 also introduces native RDMA support for GPU-to-storage data transfers that bypass the CPU entirely.
The platform targets AI factories, Neocloud operators, life sciences research, federal agencies, and enterprises running GPU-accelerated workloads. It delivers 60 percent-plus lower total cost of ownership versus all-flash competitors while maintaining terabytes-per-second throughput.
With enterprise SSD prices surging 53–58 percent in Q1 2026, V12’s ability to deliver flash-speed performance using a fraction of the flash is not just innovative; it is economically essential. It combines parallel file performance, mixed-fleet tiering, and multi-level erasure coding in one stack.
Finalists:
Dell Lightning File System
Infinidat InfiniBox G4 Platform
NetApp AFX
Winner: Luware Nimbus Virtual User
With expectations for rapid response and 24/7 availability, relying solely on human agents leads to bottlenecks, long wait times, and inconsistent service. Luware’s Virtual User solves this by automating routine interactions and freeing agents for complex cases.
In Luware Nimbus, Virtual Users are AI-powered bots that handle human-like conversations, route complex matters to agents and automate repetitive tasks — adapting to a wide range of business cases depending on how they are trained. These include replacing traditional IVRs, productively engaging customers in queue by collecting security information before they reach an agent or handling end-to-end self-service interactions.
Leveraging Copilot or GPT Realtime, Luware empowers customers to train the model themselves for their specific needs. Virtual User adheres to Microsoft’s security framework, ensuring compliance with relevant data privacy regulations — a top concern for enterprise customers.
Adaptability is where the power of Virtual User lies: it can be configured to serve any function customers envision. For instance, a major insurance provider reported that with their traditional IVR systems, the First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate was 74 percent. After implementing Luware’s Virtual User AI bot, customers were routed to the right agent, leading to a significantly higher FCR rate of 96 percent—a staggering 22 percent improvement in FCR that clearly demonstrates the product’s impact.
This versatility is also powerfully demonstrated in critical areas like customer identification. For a major bank, verifying each caller typically takes 90 seconds. In an industry handling up to 100,000 calls monthly, automating just this step with Virtual User saves an astounding 2,500 hours of agent time every month – equivalent to over 100 full workdays! This verification can occur while the customer is waiting, transforming idle hold time into a productive and engaging experience.
Finalists:
Jabra PanaCast 40 VBS
Meeting Owl 5 Pro
Winner: StorMagic SvHCI 2.4
StorMagic SvHCI 2.4 introduces major improvements to enterprise deployment automation allowing remote, headless installation, as well as workload migration with warm VM import from VMware environments. This is alongside OVA/OVF imports and exports, stretched cluster capabilities, and VM-level snapshots.
Combined, these new features provide organizations using SvHCI with significantly improved functionality within the existing virtualization solution. These features ensure that SvHCI is able to offer enhanced data security and disaster protection, as well as more efficient deployment and migration workflows.
The StorMagic SvHCI 2.4 product update further enhances the suitability of SvHCI for remote and harsh environments such as those at the network edge. It introduces datacenter-class features for a solution that has been purpose-built for demanding use cases that require lightweight, efficient specifications.
Consequently, SvHCI gives organizations the flexibility to configure their infrastructure in-keeping with their requirements, without having to compromise on functionality.
For example, organizations can stretch clusters across buildings, a campus, or an entire city for disaster protection, deploy SvHCI at scale remotely to headless servers across hundreds or thousands of locations, or migrate workloads off VMware environments without the need for extended maintenance windows.
