Celebrating 10 Years as NetActuate! Read the Blog
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Celebrating 10 Years as NetActuate! Read the Blog
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When you spend enough time in the trenches with customers, you start to notice a pattern that doesn’t show up in product brochures.
Our customers are building services: Global SaaS platforms, security services, financial systems, industrial workflows, real-time media. They’re running production. They’re answering to end users, internal teams, auditors, and the simple reality that downtime costs real money.
And while they all rely on the same core technologies in our tech stack, they never assemble or use them in the same way. Load balancing, databases, Kubernetes, cloud, storage, firewalls, observability, connectivity. Sometimes it’s technical. Sometimes it’s business. Usually it’s both. And once you’re operating globally, those differences compound fast.
That is the space NetActuate occupies, and it’s the reason we’ve built our platform the way we have.
We are a network-first, Anycast-first platform built around a philosophy reflected in our name, which means moving the network forward. To me, that means facilitating communication between people and things, safely and efficiently, everywhere. Our engineering decisions all support this directive
NetActuate is not a hyperscaler. We are not trying to be one. We are a small, high-performing team that builds and operates critical infrastructure at Internet scale, and we do it by partnering closely with customers at the global edge.
We are the 4th largest network in the world by peers. That scale is not just a vanity stat. It’s the result of decades of work of diligent interconnection, POP expansion, and open internet principles. For our customers this translates into real-world resilience, predictable performance, and a platform built for resiliency and performance.
It also supports meaningful parts of the Internet. We route and protect workloads that collectively handle huge volumes of production traffic. Juniper captured a snapshot of that in their NetActuate Case Study. We also keep investing in capacity and redundancy in the markets that matter.
Here’s what our customer conversations sound like.
They want global consistency, because they need predictable results across markets. They want flexibility, because their business and technical reality isn’t the same as the company next door. They want fast time to market, because opportunity doesn’t wait for a multi-year platform project. And they want a partner who can actually help when something unexpected happens.
This is the challenge we have had to solve: building an “operating layer” that lets customers customize a presence across markets, without rigidity or constraints.
This is also why I don’t describe us as a “Neo Cloud.” We are not a “me too” hyperscaler. We’re a strategic partner that has gotten very good at doing something difficult: simultaneously delivering global consistency and deep customization—at scale.
For many SaaS platforms, that flexibility is the difference between a slow, fragile expansion and a fast, repeatable one.
We now operate in over 45 global data center locations, with more sites planned. We are on every major continent, and in the markets where our customers actually need to be. We service customers in a truly global way with the same set of services across our footprint.
Consistency matters for performance. It also matters for data sovereignty.
The world is not getting simpler. Regulations are tightening. Customer requirements are getting sharper. Data residency and sovereignty are no longer edge cases. They are part of the architecture from day one.
If you want a sense of where policy is heading, look at the EU Data Act and broader work on cross-border data flows.
Being global is not just “having POPs.” It is being able to operate across different markets, with consistent controls, predictable operations, and a partner who understands what it means when a customer says, “this workload cannot leave this country” or “this data has to be processed locally.”
This is one of our differentiators, and it is one of the reasons I spend time writing about resilience and digital borders. If you are curious, you can find that work through my Forbes Technology Council profile.
As engineers, we like to say “anything is possible.” The hard part is making it possible for customers, in production, at scale.
Over the last decade, we built a platform that is self-service, API-driven, and designed for real operations. We have been able to innovate because we have not been saddled with layers of legacy process and technical debt. We are a David versus Goliath story, and we turned our small size into an advantage.
We have also been open about our platform evolution. For example, our milestone release in 2023, Platform Gen 8, focused on streamlined management of complex global deployments.
Now we are heading into 2026 with something bigger.
We are launching the 10th generation of the NetActuate platform and a major portal release we have dubbed version 6.7. Yes, 6.7. Hah hah. A funny name for serious infrastructure. We can have a little fun while we do it, but under the joke is a serious shift.
2026 is the year we set a new pace for productizing our services.
Historically, we have delivered a lot of capability through a combination of platform and service. We are keeping that partnership model while also putting more power directly in the hands of customers. Everything self-service. Everything API-driven. Better visibility. Better tooling. Better documentation. Faster time to value.
This matters because the market is changing. There lies a vast market opportunity between the commodity providers and the hyperscalers—and that is the space we are investing in. We want our customers to have real choice and best-in-class services without margin stacking or meters running on every byte.
Gen 10 builds on what we already do well: world-leading Anycast connectivity, network-first design, and a global platform that supports colocation, bare metal, and cloud.
It also introduces a new set of developer services and cloud-native features we are going to continue refining through 2026, including managed Kubernetes, cloud, storage, managed database options, and new network-based capabilities.
One area I am personally excited about is analytics and visibility. We are bringing richer network flow and dashboard capabilities into the portal, so customers can see what is happening across their footprint. This is the kind of view teams often pay separate vendors for, and we believe it should be part of the platform when you are building at the global edge.
We’re also going a step further—putting more critical decision making into the very infrastructure—be it compute, or your application stack, based on that same network intelligence. This openness and choice is the foundation of what we call the Open Networking Edge, or ONE.
We are leaning into the practical details that help customers evaluate us quickly. What services are available in which locations. How deployments work. How APIs map to workflows. What the operational model looks like. Less complexity, more clarity.
The platform will continue to evolve throughout 2026, and we’ll communicate that evolution in a way that’s easy to follow. Expect a steady stream of clear updates that highlight what’s new, what it enables, and why it's important. We’ll focus on how customers build and operate on a global scale, and ensure each update includes the key information teams need to roll out new services with confidence.
We do not talk about AI as the centerpiece of our company strategy, because it isn’t. We are not trying to be an AI company.
We are building the foundation that AI workloads depend on, then adding leverage where it actually helps customers. More inference capabilities. More customization. Better ways to deploy AI, including at the edge and in environments with real sovereignty constraints.
This is where Coherently AI comes in. We see Coherently as a natural extension for what we do and a smart strategy. Customers integrate AI capabilities tightly with our existing infrastructure foundation, accelerating time to value without turning AI infrastructure into a science project.
I’m tremendously proud of what our team has built.
We have accomplished a lot with a small team: a global footprint across 45+ locations, a network that ranks among the largest in the world by peers, and a platform that gives customers the flexibility to build how they need to build.
Gen 10 and Portal 6.7 set the stage for 2026 and a new wave of services we are bringing to market. This year we will keep investing in customers, keep shipping and deploying, and staying true to our name “NetActuate” = moving the network forward.
We’d be happy to show you the new customer platform and talk through any questions or ideas you may have. Book a time to chat with us.
Reach out to learn how our global platform can power your next deployment. Fast, secure, and built for scale.
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