The NetBox community has always been something special—full of builders, automators, and infrastructure obsessives who love making networks better. This year, we decided it was time to shine a light on some of the individuals who’ve gone above and beyond in how they’re using NetBox to drive change in their orgs and across the industry.
So we launched the NetBox Hero Awards—and wow, did the community deliver!
From datacenter pros to telco experts to folks bridging the gap between OT and IT, the nominations showed just how far NetBox has come and how people are using it to do amazing things. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce the 2025 NetBox Heroes—the winners and runners-up across six categories.
The impact of this year’s nominees is extraordinary. They showcase how NetBox is enabling infrastructure teams to drive operational clarity, reduce drift, and transform their networks into agile, automated environments. These are the architects of the future.
The 2025 NetBox Hero Awards were created to recognize the individuals who are turning ideas into action in the world of network automation. What makes these Heroes special isn’t just their technical ability—it’s their willingness to share knowledge, build repeatable processes, and raise the bar for how infrastructure can be managed in modern environments. They are role models for what’s possible when community and technology come together.
This global recognition highlights the real-world ingenuity of NetBox users applying infrastructure automation to solve complex challenges across data centers, campuses, cloud networks, telco environments, and beyond.
And with further ado, here are the winners:
2025 NetBox Hero Award Winners & Runners-Up
Datacenter Hero
Winner: Timo Rasanen, senior cloud engineer, Nokia
Timo and his team at Nokia use NetBox to power an enormous private cloud infrastructure, spanning six data centers and over a million compute cores. NetBox is tightly integrated into all operations—from planning and provisioning to automation, monitoring, and logging.
Runner-up: Pieter Lambrecht, cloud migration & implementation manager, Accenture
Pieter led large-scale datacenter transformations over two decades, and most recently, consolidated legacy tools into NetBox for documentation, configuration, and automation—establishing a robust source of truth and eliminating silos.
Campus Hero
Winner: Bryan Ward, lead network engineer, Dartmouth College
Bryan leverages NetBox Cloud and Juniper Mist to automate, scale, and modernize Dartmouth College’s infrastructure — with a deep focus on reliability, observability, and operational efficiency. In a recent Network Automation Heroes podcast, Bryan shared Dartmouth’s event-driven approach to automation, which enables their team to patch hundreds of switches during narrow maintenance windows — without disrupting classes or campus life. What once took days of manual labor now happens overnight, automatically, with human oversight only when needed. With NetBox at the core, Bryan’s team can adopt new technologies without rewriting everything from scratch.
Runner-up: Jonas Nieberle, network engineer, MTU Aero Engines
Jonas championed NetBox adoption to modernize network inventory, leveraging it for documentation and automation in one of Germany’s top engine manufacturers.
Telco, ISP, and IX Hero
Winner: Anonymous, network engineer, Leading telecom provider
After using NetBox Community edition for its DCIM needs for several years, this network engineer helped lead his company’s migration to NetBox Enterprise. The move unlocked new features and expertise from NetBox Labs. NetBox Enterprise helps the team manage assets in pre-sales labs in two states across 5,000+ devices.
Runner-up: Andrew Townson, Principal Engineer, Charter Communications
Andrew relies on NetBox Cloud to maintain Charter Communications’ network source of truth. Moving from NetBox Community edition enabled Andrew and his team to hand off the ongoing NetBox management responsibilities to the NetBox Labs team, get access to enterprise-grade features and focus on maintaining a high-performing network.
Hybrid Cloud Hero
Winner: Andy Taylor, senior network specialist solutions architect, Amazon
Andy bridged NetBox with AWS IPAM to deliver a unified source of truth for hybrid and multi-cloud IP management. His work has accelerated cloud-native automation for enterprise customers.
Runner-up: Sander Hilven, cloud architect, Cebeo
Sander built custom integrations pulling from Azure, ServiceNow, Cisco ISE, and more into NetBox, creating a real-time, accurate infrastructure view that supports troubleshooting, reporting, and lifecycle management across 50+ sites.
IoT/OT Hero
Winner: The Malcolm Core Development Team from Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
Idaho National Laboratory: Seth Grover, Lead Malcolm Developer; Melanie Pierce, Cybersecurity Analyst; Scott Jeffery, Cybersecurity Researcher; Jason Rush, Cybersecurity Analyst
CISA: Shaun Long, deputy section chief of operational technology; Lieutenant Jacob Duda, cybersecurity analyst detailed from United States Coast Guard; Chief Petty Officer Samuel Lee, cybersecurity analyst detailed from United States Coast Guard
Through the Malcolm project, Idaho National Lab and CISA harnessed NetBox to secure OT environments, demonstrating the platform’s flexibility beyond traditional IT networks. Malcolm leverages NetBox for asset inventory to identify and mitigate network security threats in critical OT infrastructure environments. For more information on the Malcolm project and resources on protecting critical OT infrastructure environments, watch this webinar.
Runner-up: Igor Pecovnik, Project Manager, Armbian Linux
Igor has used NetBox for nearly a decade to manage infrastructure ranging from mirror servers to automated wireless testbeds. He integrated it with GitHub Actions to automate configuration and testing pipelines.
Community Hero
Winner: Daniel Sheppard, Senior Network Analyst, University of Winnipeg
As a current NetBox maintainer, Daniel is a long-time contributor to the NetBox open source ecosystem. His work – including GitHub contributions and educational resources – has been instrumental in making NetBox what it is today.
Runner-up: Dwayn Matthies, Principal Systems Engineer, Cloudflare
Dwayn led NetBox adoption at scale within Cloudflare, redefining fleet management and setting new benchmarks for operational transparency in one of the world’s largest networks.
On behalf of all of us at NetBox Labs, congratulations again to our winners and runners-up. We thank every nominee and those who submitted on behalf of their peers. And last but not least, thank you to each NetBox community member – you are what makes NetBox what it is.
If you haven’t joined our monthly calls or received our newsletter, visit https://netboxlabs.com/join-the-netbox-community.
