Last year Intel announced the Intel® Network Builders Winners’ Circle—a program for partner companies working to accelerate network transformation using Intel technology to optimize their solutions. Last week at the SDN NFV World Congress event, Intel announced the first finalists of the program at the Intel Network Builders Summit, which coincided with the SDN NFV World Congress event, attracting more than 1700 industry participants, taking place in the event in the Hague, Netherlands.

As part of this first-ever event, Intel evaluated more than 240 projects, for consideration across three award levels: Leaders’ Board, Solution Plus Partner, and Solution Partner.

Of the 64 projects that were awarded a place in the Winners Circle, we are pleased to announce that Affirmed Networks was one of just 20 companies to join the Leaders Board, the program’s highest level.

As a company committed to working with strategic partners like Intel to ensure the highest levels of success and performance for our customers, we are extremely honored to achieve the program’s distinction. As a company, we have continually invested in building the industry’s most complete ecosystem focused on driving performance and accelerating deployments. We would like to congratulate all of the companies that were recognized as part of the Network Builders Program, especially our partners who joined us in the Winner’s Circle, including Canonical, Dell, HPE, Red Hat and VMware.

The goal of the Winners’ Circle is to deliver technical leadership, advance open source standards, and collaborate with end users to drive innovation. Requirements for selection to the Intel Network Builders Winners’ Circle included open source contributions, published benchmarks and deployments to Communication Service Providers (CommSPs).

About Intel Network Builders

Intel® Network Builders is an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs), operating system vendors (OSVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs), system integrators, and communications service providers coming together to accelerate the adoption of network functions virtualization (NFV)- and software defined networking (SDN)-based solutions in telecommunications networks and public, private enterprise, and hybrid clouds.