Software is front and center when it comes to some of the most innovating networking startups of 2017.
Many of the networking startups on this list built solutions around software-as-a-service, network monitoring and troubleshooting, programmability and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) with leaders hailing from the likes of Cisco, Huawei and Arista Networks. Other startups created products leveraging intent-based networking, which Gartner says can reduce network infrastructure delivery times by 90 percent while also reducing the number and duration of outages by at least 50 percent.