Gluware's Double Gold Win Signals a New Era for AI-Ready Networks

SACRAMENTO, CA – April 29, 2026 – As enterprises race to harness the power of artificial intelligence, a foundational layer of their infrastructure is straining under the pressure. Now, a double Gold Stevie® Award win for Gluware, a leader in intelligent network automation, is highlighting a critical truth for the AI era: true transformation begins with the network.

The company was honored in the 24th Annual American Business Awards®, often called "the Oscars of the business world," securing top honors in both the Software-Defined Infrastructure and No Code/Low Code Platform categories. The recognition, selected from a field of over 3,600 nominations, validates the company’s platform as a crucial tool for businesses navigating the collision of ambitious AI goals with the reality of complex, aging network infrastructure.

The Network Bottleneck in the Age of AI

The enterprise pursuit of AI is creating a data tsunami. Analysts at IDC predict that by this year, AI workloads will drive over half of all enterprise data traffic. This explosive growth, coupled with the need for ultra-low latency, is pushing traditional network architectures to their breaking point. Many organizations are discovering that their legacy infrastructure, a complex web of hardware from multiple vendors built over decades, is a significant bottleneck to innovation.

This is the challenge Gluware aims to solve. The company argues that before enterprises can successfully deploy fleets of AI agents and run massive data models, they must first automate and stabilize the underlying network. "As enterprises navigate a rapidly changing AI landscape, the ability to operate networks with speed, precision, and validated confidence becomes the foundation everything else depends on," said Jeff Gray, CEO and Co-Founder of Gluware, in a statement. "We've spent years building that foundation to prepare enterprises for this AI moment."

The sentiment is echoed across the industry, where uptime, agility, and the velocity of network changes are no longer just metrics for the IT department. They have become the operational prerequisites for every AI initiative on a company's roadmap, turning network automation from a technical nice-to-have into a core business strategy.

Innovation Under the Hood: A Dual-Path Approach

The Stevie Awards judges, a panel of more than 250 professionals, lauded Gluware's platform as "a genuinely category-defining platform that transforms complex, multi-vendor network infrastructure into a self-operating, intent-driven system." At the heart of this recognition are two key innovations: a unique dual-path architecture and a proprietary technology known as DIAL.

For the No Code/Low Code category, judges praised the company's "highly differentiated dual-path automation strategy." This approach provides a no-code interface with pre-built applications that allow network teams to automate common tasks like configuration management and OS upgrades quickly, without needing to write a single line of code. Simultaneously, it offers a low-code integrated development environment (IDE) for engineers who need to build custom, sophisticated automation workflows. This flexibility is crucial for what are known as "brownfield" environments—the existing, heterogeneous networks common in most large enterprises.

Underpinning this entire system is the Gluware DIAL (Device Interaction and Automation Layer). This proprietary abstraction layer is the engine that enables true multi-vendor automation, supporting over 55 different network operating systems from 22 vendors. Judges called DIAL "particularly significant," noting that it "materially reduces operational fragility" by replacing hundreds of fragile, vendor-specific scripts with a single, unified intent model. Instead of telling each device how to perform a task, engineers simply declare the desired state, and DIAL handles the complex, vendor-specific translation.

Translating Technical Wins into Business Value

While the technical accolades are significant, the platform's true validation comes from its real-world impact. The awards panel pointed to customer outcomes that translate directly to the bottom line, including a reported 95% reduction in network outages and OS upgrades performed up to 300 times faster.

These figures represent a dramatic shift in operational efficiency and risk management. Network outages can cost large enterprises hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, and manual OS upgrades across a global network are notoriously slow, risky, and resource-intensive. By automating these processes with pre- and post-change validation, Gluware not only accelerates operations but also dramatically reduces the potential for human error, the leading cause of network downtime.

Major corporations have seen these benefits firsthand. Pharmaceutical giant Merck, a reported customer, was able to cut the time spent on global network configuration changes by an astounding 98% after implementing the platform. This allows highly skilled network engineers to move away from tedious, repetitive tasks and focus on strategic projects that drive business value, a critical advantage in an industry facing a persistent IT skills gap.

Building the Foundation for Autonomous Operations

The recognition from the American Business Awards comes at a pivotal moment. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in enterprise tools—from observability platforms to cybersecurity systems—the network is becoming the shared surface where every automated action lands. Without a validated, intent-based automation layer to govern these actions, the proliferation of AI agents could introduce as much risk as they aim to eliminate.

"Organizations across the United States continue to set a high standard for innovation and performance," said Stevie Awards President Maggie Miller. "The breadth and quality of nominations...reflect a dynamic and competitive business environment."

For Gluware, the awards serve as both a milestone for its current technology and a signal for the future. The company is positioning its platform not just as an automation tool, but as the foundational layer for the next generation of AI-driven, self-operating networks. By providing a reliable, intelligent, and programmable infrastructure, the platform aims to ensure that as enterprises become more reliant on AI, their networks are ready to meet the demand.