Evaluating New Network Tech Is Broken

Every network leader knows the story:

You see a better way to build your network—SONiC, open hardware, AI for NetOps.
You talk to vendors. You collect decks. Everyone nods.

And then reality hits:

• Change freeze is coming up.
• Budget isn't approved yet.
• Your operations team says, "We can't risk production right now."
• The POC gets scheduled "next quarter"… then "after the refresh"… then "maybe next year."

Meanwhile, your existing vendors move slowly, and you're stuck waiting for the perfect time that never quite arrives.

We built SONiC One Center and One AI Center to fix that.

SONiC One Center: Start Your SONiC Journey Before the PO

SONiC One Center is a ready-made, multi-vendor SONiC OCP lab that mirrors real-world infrastructure.

Instead of:

• Waiting for hardware to arrive
• Negotiating lab space during a change freeze
• Stitching together your own tooling and test beds

…you log in to SONiC One Center and:

• Try pure, open-source SONiC on multiple vendors' switches
• Load your own configurations and designs
• Use our built-in tooling to observe, break, and validate the network
• Run POC-style scenarios without touching your production fabric

The point is simple:
You don't have to start evaluating SONiC the day you sign a PO. You start the day you think, "Maybe it's time we looked at SONiC."

By the time budget and approvals catch up, you already know:

• Which vendors do you like
• How SONiC behaves with your design
• What operational tooling you'll need
• Where the real risks and opportunities are

One AI Center: Build AI for NetOps Before the Project Exists

The same problem exists with AI for networks.

AI sounds great in the boardroom, but in real life:

• Nobody wants to test new AI logic on a live production network.
• It's hard to get time, people, and data aligned for a proper experiment.
• Budget often appears after everyone is already skeptical.

One AI Center is where you design, build, and test AI for NetOps—without waiting for a formal project.

In One AI Center, you can:

• Experiment with Network Copilot (NCP) and other AI components on realistic topologies
• Replay or simulate incidents and capacity issues
• Prototype workflows, prompts, and policies before any AI touches production data
• Show your leadership a working demo, not just a slide

Again, the idea is:
You don't start AI for NetOps when the RFP hits your inbox. You start when someone says, "We should explore AI for operations."

Why We Built Them: Community-First, Multi-Vendor, Customer-Ready

Both centers are built around three principles:

• Start when you think, not when you buy.
  The moment you feel pressure to modernize—TCO, AI workloads, multi-vendor flexibility—you should have a place to start evaluating safely.
• Community-first, multi-vendor by default.
  You should see SONiC and AI for NetOps across different vendors and NOSes, not just a single, locked-in stack.
• No dollar required to learn.
  You should be able to understand the technology, see it running, and build confidence before you spend budget or burn change windows.

Why You Should Care

If you’re a CIO or VP of Infrastructure , these centers:

• De-risk big moves like SONiC, AI fabrics, or AI for NetOps
• Give you real data and demos to take into budget and strategy meetings
• Shorten the gap between idea and deployment-ready

If you’re a Network Architect or NetOps lead, they:

• Give you a safe, rich environment to test your designs
• Let you see multi-vendor SONiC with your own configs and failure scenarios
• Help you shape AI operations on your terms, not a vendor's marketing slide

If you’re a partner or vendor, they:

• Provide a neutral, community-first space where your gear and solutions can be evaluated fairly
• Help your customers move from conversations to real technical validation faster

How to Get Started

• SONiC One Center: Bring your configs, your use cases, your questions. We'll map them onto multi-vendor SONiC so you can see what's real.
• One AI Center: Bring your incidents, workflows, and operational pains. We'll use them to shape AI that actually fits your network and team.

Because the next time someone in your org says,

"We should really look at SONiC."
or
"We should really do AI for NetOps."

…you'll be able to answer:
"We already started."