September 22, 2026 — Philadelphia, PA — The Business Intelligence Group today announced the winners of the 2026 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing, the annual program recognizing the companies, products, and individuals pushing the boundaries of what cloud technology can do. This year's class spans 18 categories, and it tells a single story: the cloud is no longer where enterprises put their work. It is increasingly what performs it.
"For a decade, the cloud question was 'where does this run?' This year, every serious submission answered a different one: 'what does it do without us?'" said Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at the Business Intelligence Group. "We saw named agents closing invoices, edge platforms holding a site together when the network drops, and power and cooling engineered as a single cloud system. The winners weren't the ones talking about AI. They were the ones who could say what it finished."
Overall Winner: Loadsmart
Loadsmart has been named the Overall Winner of the 2026 Stratus Awards, earning the highest score in the program for putting autonomous agents into the core of freight operations rather than on top of them.
"We built Loadsmart AI as a layer on top of what our customers already run, not a system to rip out and replace,” said Felipe Capella, CEO, Loadsmart. “Agents take on the repetitive work; our people stay on the relationships and the exceptions that need judgment. We're honored to be recognized this way, and this award belongs to the whole team, and every customer who built this with us."
ShipperGuide TMS runs on Loadsmart AI. Teams set up agents for Coverage, Carrier Assignment, Tracking, and Settlement to handle rates, tendering, tracking, and invoices, so the platform executes instead of working through manual, one-by-one clicks. FreightIntel AI runs alongside them to find cost leaks. Shippers cut costs 35 percent per lane and automate 97 percent of shipments.
Overall Individual Winner: Elise Houlik, Intuit
Elise Houlik, Chief Privacy Officer at Intuit, has been named the Overall Individual Winner of the 2026 Stratus Awards and the recipient of the Cloud for Good Impact Award.
“Receiving this recognition from the Business Intelligence Group is a true honor. It's a testament to our team and Intuit’s dedication to building trust at every stage of innovation,” said Houlik. “Whether in legal, privacy, engineering, or product design, embedding guardrails and data stewardship directly into platforms ensures that privacy enables growth. I’m deeply proud of the work we’re doing to leverage cloud and AI technologies for good, as we safely empower our team to innovate with confidence and help millions of consumers, businesses and accountants achieve better financial outcomes.”
Stepping into a historically uniform industry, Elise Houlik didn't just earn her place, she redefined it. As Intuit's Chief Privacy Officer, she transforms data protection into an engine for AI innovation, while actively pulling up a chair to bring the next generation of female leaders onto her team.
Award-Winning Organizations
- Loadsmart - Agentic AI/Autonomous Cloud Operations (Overall Winner)
- C&D Technologies - AI Data Center Infrastructure
- Ellucian - Education
- haimaker - AI Infrastructure/Machine Learning Ops
- Impel - Automotive
- Nestlé - Food
- TEKsystems Global Services - Hybrid Cloud/AI Solutions and Applications
- Trace3 - Agentic AI/Autonomous Cloud Operations
- Wolters Kluwer Enablon - Software as a Service
Award-Winning Products
- Agilysys Intelligent Guest Profile - Hospitality
- CloudEASE, Parking BOXX - Internet of Things (IoT)
- Envoy - Security
- Eve Security - Security
- IBM Cloudability - FinOps/Cloud Cost Optimization
- IBM Power Virtual Server - Infrastructure as a Service
- Keepit - Backup/Disaster Recovery/Resilience
- Megaport Storage - Cloud Networking & Interconnect
- Messagepoint Communications Cloud - Agentic AI/Autonomous Cloud Operations
- Optro - Software as a Service
- RapidSOS Safety Network - Platform as a Service
- Schneider Electric Grid-to-Chip, Chip-to-Chiller AI Infrastructure - AI Data Center Infrastructure
- SmarTec Nurse Assist, Sagility - Software as a Service
- ZEDEDA - Edge Computing
What the 2026 Winners Reveal About Cloud Computing
The 2026 Stratus Awards mark a turn in what the cloud is for. These are the patterns that define this year's class.
Agentic AI moved from demo to production, and the winners could name the agents. The strongest submissions this year didn't describe "AI-powered" platforms. They described specific agents with specific jobs. Loadsmart's Coverage, Carrier Assignment, Tracking, and Settlement agents took the Overall Winner spot for executing freight work instead of queuing it. Impel put autonomous agents on every automotive lead, reading sentiment, intent, and urgency in real time and responding with AI-generated personalized video, setting appointments without rep intervention. Messagepoint applied agentic AI to customer communications management. Trace3 built the strategy, architecture, and governance to move agentic AI from concept to secure production. Eve Security exists because those agents now need governing. What separated this year's winners was the ability to say which system did which job, rather than applying one broad AI label to everything.
The data center itself became a cloud category. AI workloads have made power, cooling, and density a cloud story rather than a facilities story. Schneider Electric's winning entry treats the problem as one engineered system, delivering a complete grid-to-chip power train and chip-to-chiller cooling by integrating Motivair liquid cooling, electrical infrastructure, and ETAP digital twins. C&D Technologies approached the same demand from the backup-power side, with Pure Lead batteries built for the reliability requirements of data centers, telecommunications, and critical infrastructure. The cloud has always been someone else's computer. In 2026, some of the most consequential winning work is about keeping it powered and cool.
Trusted data became the precondition for everything else. Nestlé won its category for making data a strategic asset, turning fragmented information into reusable data products through 15 Enterprise Data Domains, 16 critical master data elements, and enterprise governance that enables AI at scale. Keepit won for a vendor-neutral, truly immutable cloud dedicated to SaaS data protection, positioned explicitly as the data foundation under enterprise AI. IBM Cloudability won FinOps for translating multi-cloud, container, and AI spend into a single source of truth that finance, technology, and engineering teams can actually agree on. The pattern is consistent: this year's cloud innovation runs on data someone can vouch for.
Governance stopped being the brake and became the enabler. Intuit's Elise Houlik earned Overall Individual Winner for transforming data protection into an engine for AI innovation rather than a checkpoint in front of it. Optro won for replacing fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes with an AI-powered GRC intelligence platform that turns reactive risk management into proactive foresight. Wolters Kluwer Enablon won for connecting EHS, ESG, sustainability, compliance, and operational risk in one system. Eve Security won for giving organizations visibility, control, and protection over AI agents so adoption stays compliant and responsible. Trust infrastructure is where a meaningful share of this year's cloud innovation actually happened.
The most interesting cloud engineering is happening where the network isn't. ZEDEDA won Edge Computing for a platform that delivers zero-touch operations and reliable performance in low-connectivity environments across thousands of distributed sites. Parking BOXX won IoT with an architecture built on the same premise: every lane keeps working even when the network doesn't, so drivers keep moving and operators stay in control. Megaport extended its backbone beyond connectivity into distributed storage co-located with compute. Resilience, in this cohort, means designing for the moment the cloud isn't reachable.
Vertical depth beat horizontal breadth. This year's winners solved named industry problems rather than generic ones. Sagility's SmarTec Nurse Assist targets the $50 billion prior authorization crisis, processing more than 2 million reviews at 94 percent accuracy and cutting review times 40 percent. RapidSOS connects more than 723 million devices, 250 enterprises, and 23,500 public safety agencies in real time. Agilysys turned the traditional hotel guest record into a real-time intelligence layer shared across departments. Ellucian rebuilt the student information system as a SaaS-native platform with AI in the experience. Envoy built critical event management for security teams who need to know who is in the building.
Company size predicted nothing. Winners with fewer than 100 employees, including haimaker, ZEDEDA, and Eve Security, placed alongside IBM, Nestlé, Schneider Electric, and Intuit. haimaker's single OpenAI-compatible endpoint reaches more than 200 models from 29 providers with learned auto-routing, pay-as-you-go and free to start. In cloud, scale of impact and scale of headcount have come apart.
Finalists
A group of nominees were also recognized as finalists. These submissions ranked among the top nominees in the program and earned additional recognition. The finalists are:
- Airia
- Anteriad Marketing Cloud
- Caylent
- Effectual Inc.
- EnerSys
- Impel Next-Gen Sales AI
- Jenzabar One
- Sphera PCF Calculator
About the Stratus Awards
The Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing honor the companies, products, and individuals innovating in the cloud and delivering offerings that are truly differentiated in the market. Since 2014, the program has recognized organizations that add measurable value through cloud-based solutions, from infrastructure and platform services to security, edge computing, and the AI systems now running on top of them. Every nomination is reviewed against objective scoring benchmarks by a panel of experienced business professionals, identifying the work that is genuinely pushing the boundaries of the cloud.
About Business Intelligence Group
Business Intelligence Group (BIG) is an independent awards organization that has been recognizing outstanding achievement in business since 2012. Now in its 14th awards season, BIG operates 12 annual programs spanning innovation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, customer service, cloud computing, sustainability, sales and marketing, workplace culture, and women's leadership. Business award programs include the BIG Innovation Awards, AI Excellence Awards, Fortress Cyber Security Awards, Excellence in Customer Service Awards, Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing, Sustainability Awards, SAMMY Awards for Sales and Marketing, Best Places to Work Awards, Herizon Awards, We Love Tech Awards, NAA Top Employers Award, and BIG Awards for Business.
Unlike popularity contests, BIG programs use professional judging panels and objective scoring benchmarks to identify organizations, products, and individuals making real, measurable impact. Winners receive a complete promotional toolkit, including blockchain-verified credentials, press release support, social media assets, and featured placement across BIG's global community of more than one million business professionals.
For more information about BIG award programs, nomination deadlines, and judging criteria, visit bintelligence.com.
Photo by ThisIsEngineering