TechFinitive Awards 2026 – Data & AI Excellence

The Data & AI Excellence category at the TechFinitive Awards 2026 recognises organisations finding practical ways to turn data and artificial intelligence into business value. This year’s five finalists approach the challenge from different angles, spanning AI-powered infrastructure maintenance, governed access to enterprise data, industrial automation, hybrid data management and AI observability. Rather than focusing solely on what AI might achieve, their solutions address the foundations that make it useful in practice: reliable data, effective governance, operational insight and measurable outcomes.

Their work highlights the breadth of the data and AI landscape, from using predictive analysis to prevent hardware failures and connecting large language models to trusted enterprise data, to embedding AI agents in industrial workflows and giving organisations greater visibility over their data estates and AI expenditure. Each finalist demonstrates a different way to tackle the challenges of putting data and AI to work at enterprise scale. You can read more about what our judges had to say about each submission here (scroll below).

Without further ado, the nominees for Data & AI Excellence in 2026 are:

• Park Place Technologies
• Simba (insightsoftware)
• IFS
• Hitachi Vantara
• Riverbed Technology

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Here’s what our judges had to say about the nominees

Park Place Technologies

While many entries in this category focus on enabling enterprises to develop and implement AI functionality, Park Place Technologies utilises AI analysis to deliver a defined service with tangible value. Targeting enterprises with extended, multi-vendor hardware estates, Park Place unifies myriad telemetry feeds, giving clients a single view of the estate, allowing for continuous monitoring and assessment. Platform services like Performance Insight measures components in real time against defined thresholds, while Asset Intelligence utilises AI to assess hardware for risk of failure, allowing for preventative maintenance rather than outage recovery. Park Place utilises AI to manage and maintain the very systems that could be running enterprise AI workloads. 

Simba (insightsoftware)

Any AI development and deployment relies on data – that data needs to be accurate, relevant, compliant and up to date. For many enterprises the core challenge is making disparate pools of siloed data available for AI ingestion and processing, often requiring migration and consolidation. Simba Agentic Intelligence builds a custom semantic layer based on, and with access to all relevant data wherever it resides – on premises, public cloud, private cloud, etc. Enterprises can plug an LLM directly into Agentic Intelligence, ensuring the most accurate results based on the core data pools below it. And with governance baked into that semantic layer, guard rails are present at the query stage and reflected in the result. 

IFS

IFS specialises in industrial AI solutions, providing tangible operational benefits to asset intensive verticals such as aerospace, transport, construction and engineering. IFS Cloud leverages AI and machine learning across multiple business layers, ensuring that guidance, insight and support are delivered with accuracy and speed – for field engineers, that could be the difference between a first-time repair, or a second call-out. IFS Digital Workers provide agentic AI functionality plugged directly into industrial operations – these agents can perform high-volume tasks such as processing purchase orders or restocking parts, freeing up valuable human resources for more important work. Permission-based governance is baked into the process, with exceptions escalated to the humans in the loop. 

Hitachi Vantara

There were many award entries for data management solutions. While not surprising – data is currency and efficient management and use of that data is critical – Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One was the only entry that spanned the entire data ecosystem. At the foundation level, VSP One Block provides cutting edge enterprise storage, based on high-speed, low-latency, high-density NVMe SSD technology, with server capacity scaling up to 288 60TB drives. Meanwhile VSP 360 provides an overarching view of an enterprise’s entire data estate – whether that be VSP One Block or cloud-based – allowing centralised visibility and management across the board. VSP One provides 100% data availability, with robust protection across an entire hybrid data estate. 

Riverbed

AI adoption has turned into a metaphorical gold rush for enterprises, with the fear of being left behind often leading to unmanaged cost spirals. Riverbed has expanded its data expertise to deliver a structured platform for AI management and observability, built on a solid data foundation. First, Riverbed can quickly – and far more cost effectively – move and consolidate huge, siloed data sets, creating a unified pool. It then indexes the raw data but pulls in only what is required for analytic purposes. The intelligence layer then applies natural language assisted AI to expedite analysis and insight. But key to all of this is Riverbed AI Assurance, providing detailed AI observability to track adoption, usage and costs, giving enterprises true AI accountability and control.