Get to Know Us
Since 2006, Hardware Nation has helped customers buy, build and expand networking and IT infrastructure. We work with data center, cloud and hosting operators, telecom companies and ISPs, enterprise IT teams, technology companies and infrastructure integrators.
Networking is at the center of our work, including data center, service-provider, enterprise, campus and wireless networks. We also supply servers, storage, cybersecurity products, network adapters, optics, cabling, racks, power, infrastructure software, licensing and support. We work with established manufacturers and emerging technology companies to help customers equip and run these environments.
The business has grown through equipment distribution, online commerce and long-term customer relationships. Along the way, our work has expanded to include network design, hardware and software integration, production deployments and network automation.
We serve organizations worldwide, from technology startups to global enterprises, universities, research institutions and government agencies. Some customers manage their own engineering and deployment. Others work with us throughout the project. We support both.
Hardware Nation is a women-owned business registered in SAM.gov.
We’re technical.
Our experience includes deploying networks built with Arista, Juniper, HPE and NVIDIA equipment, NVIDIA switches running Cumulus Linux, and Edgecore switches running SONiC. We have successfully deployed SONiC in production for multiple customers. Our open networking work also includes IP Infusion OcNOS and Pica8.
That experience informs the questions we ask before recommending equipment. Does the required feature work on this hardware and software release? Are the optics supported? What licenses are needed? Can the customer access the interfaces their software depends on? What happens when a component fails?
We understand how switching silicon, hardware design and network operating systems affect those answers. We also work with the software, APIs and automation that customers use to manage their infrastructure.
When a requirement needs deeper investigation, we work directly with vendor product and engineering teams. We can explain the intended use, reproduce technical issues and evaluate available options with the people responsible for the platform.
Open networking is an important part of this experience. We also deploy conventional vendor-supported systems. The choice depends on the customer’s requirements, budget and operating model.
How we work.
We work with your team.
Our mission is to enable flexibility and cost reduction in IT infrastructure by transforming disaggregated and open-source components into specialized solutions through intelligent engineering.
Who we work with.
We have served more than 1,000 customers worldwide, including technology startups, service providers, global enterprises, universities, research institutions and government agencies.
Our customers include organizations purchasing equipment for their own operations, technology companies building products and services, and partners delivering infrastructure to their customers.
Organizations we have served include:
Aerospace, defense and industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, SpaceX and Rockwell Automation.
Government and research: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the State of Nevada.
Higher education: Stanford University, Georgia Tech Research Institute and Dartmouth College.
Technology and enterprise: Accenture, HPE, Xilinx, Zoox, and Ubisoft.
Our work ranges from equipment distribution to successful SONiC deployments in production networks for startups and cloud infrastructure providers. We help customers evaluate and adopt technology, working through hardware, software and support choices to meet their performance, cost and operational requirements.
Our founder.
Alex Cronin founded Hardware Nation in 2006 at age 24. A Georgia Tech graduate and hands-on builder, he brings two decades of experience across networking, data center infrastructure, software and technology businesses. His work spans the full technology stack, from silicon to software. He likes taking complex systems apart, understanding how they work and building new ones.
Alex works directly with customers and engineering teams on architecture, platform selection and deployment. His experience spans traditional and open networking, including Arista, Juniper, HPE, NVIDIA Cumulus Linux, IP Infusion OcNOS and successful deployments of SONiC in production at the enterprise level. He helps customers understand how hardware, software and support choices affect performance, cost and operational complexity.
His experience also spans sourcing, distribution and logistics, including work with manufacturers and authorized distributors, international delivery and coordination across multiple locations. He has helped customers navigate hardware shortages and long lead times, identify alternatives and weigh the tradeoffs in platform capabilities, software compatibility, support, cost and delivery.
Alex believes customers should have choice and control across the technology stack. That belief drew him to open networking and continues to shape his interest in open source. He sees a place for both open-source and proprietary technologies, often within the same system. The right approach depends on the use case, performance, cost, support requirements and the customer’s engineering resources and operational capabilities.
His close relationships with ODMs include visits to manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and ongoing work with product and engineering teams. He knows the people behind the products and understands how their teams approach development, testing and manufacturing. Those relationships matter when a customer needs technical answers beyond the datasheet, a feature investigated or a hardware or software limitation resolved. He also participates in industry communities and events including OCP, ONUG and NANOG.
Alex is also the founder of Nanites AI, a separate venture where he built an agentic platform for troubleshooting enterprise networks. Through that work, he has spent thousands of hours in hands-on AI engineering, using AI coding assistants to build and test agentic systems and network automation. That includes developing AI harnesses to connect models with tools and network devices, manage context and permissions, and enforce human approval controls. His work also includes designing evaluations to test agent behavior and reliability.
His work in AI reflects the same approach. Customers can build on commercial AI services, deploy open-weight or open-source models in their own environments, or combine both. They want to own what gives their business an edge while choosing where to build, buy or integrate. His experience building AI systems helps customers explore what is possible and navigate those technical and business tradeoffs. He also understands the bottlenecks between design and production: platform validation, software limitations, supply constraints and unclear support responsibilities. That experience helps Hardware Nation turn ideas into working production-grade systems.
Nanites AI has been named as an emerging Agentic NetOps vendor in Gartner research, covered by InformationWeek, and included in Cisco DevNet’s discussion of commercial AI agents for networking.
In 2025, Nanites AI was selected as one of 12 finalists in the T Challenge, organized by T-Mobile US and Deutsche Telekom. Alex presented the work at Deutsche Telekom’s headquarters in Bonn, Germany. He has also presented Nanites at CableLabs events and Network X Americas.
Alex brings this experience to Hardware Nation’s work with customers choosing equipment, adopting new technology, integrating software and developing their own automation. His current work also includes applying AI to product research, distribution, e-commerce, analytics and business workflows. He understands both the engineering and the economics: how a system works, what it takes to build and support it, and whether it makes sense for the customer.
Hardware Nation Solutions
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