TechFinitive Awards 2026 – Enterprise Infrastructure Excellence

Enterprise infrastructure rarely attracts attention until it becomes a bottleneck, a security concern or a drain on resources. Yet the systems underpinning modern businesses face growing demands, from supporting AI workloads and managing expanding volumes of data to extending the life of existing technology and reducing environmental impact. The five finalists in the Enterprise Infrastructure category at the TechFinitive Awards 2026 address these challenges from different angles, with solutions spanning mainframe modernisation, data storage, datacentre design and more sustainable hardware.

The shortlist highlights the importance of making infrastructure work harder without adding unnecessary cost or complexity. Approaches include refactoring legacy systems to improve security and maintainability, connecting storage systems to improve performance and efficiency, and using policies to move data between storage tiers while maintaining protection and availability. Elsewhere, datacentre design is being shaped by energy and water demands, while repairable, upgradeable hardware offers an alternative to the cycle of replacement and electronic waste. Together, the finalists demonstrate why infrastructure innovation is as much about long-term resilience and responsible resource use as raw performance. You can read more about what our judges had to say about each submission here (scroll below).

Without further ado, the nominees for Enterprise Infrastructure Excellence in 2026 are:

• Rocket Software
• Hitachi Vantara
• Prime Data Centers
• Acer
• Spectra Logic

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

Rocket Software

Technical debt is often overused, and with all the cloud and AI we hear about in the media, it is easy to forget that even now most complex systems live on mainframes. To enable the refactoring of existing systems to more modern coding languages, which will allow additional improved security to be layered into the infrastructure. It is also worth noting that safer languages can improve security and speed just by themselves and to do this in a known and staged process is a welcome benefit, especially when it is highly likely that the refactoring will not be a one-off process and will have to continue into the future.

Hitachi Vantara

Having the infrastructure connected in a way that allows high speed between the discrete subsystems makes the whole system faster, and the ability to store a single item once across multiple storage pools with a deduplication process and to compress the result as well is something very difficult to do and should be lauded. AI is potentially the next business transformation process; we have done digital transformation, and it is likely that the next is AI. Part of this will be using AI to help forecast and embed it into the future requirements of the business.

Prime Data Centers

Datacentres are the modern equivalent of the dirty, smoky chimney of the computing world that we all live in, and a necessary evil for today’s interconnected world; however, unlike those chimneys and the smog it produced, datacentres instead pull water and energy from the surrounding area.  The ability to face and confront these issues and to understand the business needs that data and processes need different types of datacentres in different locations; whilst also accepting and mitigating these downsides that such needs create is a massive positive. The example in Denmark of turning waste heat into a positive with district heating shows exactly what can be done when the issues are thought about over the longer term, rather than just offsetting the damage to the planet.

Acer

Modern tech has tended to be a sealed unit with no upgrade or repairability possible, which creates a lot of e-waste when in the past these items could be repaired.  It is claimed that this is all necessary to make things smaller and lighter. So it is a breath of fresh air to have a known and big brand seeing the light and embracing the return of user upgrading and repair, something that can not be seen as a bad thing, even if you don’t want to do it yourself.

Spectra Logic

Data storage and manageability is an ongoing and costly process.  Knowing what you have and where, and balancing this against the cost to maintain both the data itself and the access to it, can be a full-time job.  The ability to set policies to move data to and from slower, cheaper storage to fast access and back again, built purely on the policy, means you can plan with confidence that the data is available when it is needed.  Adding the ability to add encryption over these storage types and immutability of the data gives further confidence that data won’t go missing when it should not.