Q. What have been your key developments so far in 2017?
We officially launched PacketFabric in January 2017, bringing to market an SDN-powered, Ethernet-based connectivity platform powered by industry-leading, innovative technology. Our platform has introduced the flexibility and provisioning ease of the cloud to the traditionally rigid and complex initiatives of networking and interconnection. We’re continuing to build out the feature set on top of our secure, scalable, and reliable networking platform. We’ve also been onboarding customers and partners into our ecosystem. This includes extending the reach of network service providers, data centre operators, and cloud infrastructure and XaaS providers. In under four months, we’ve extended our nationwide network from 86 premier carrier-neutral colocation facilities in 11 US markets at the time of launch, to 128 locations in 12 primary markets as of today.
Q. What are your strategic priorities this year?
We’re launching several new products over the next few months to create solutions to the challenges in various verticals, including web-scale companies, cloud providers, research and education, network service providers, healthcare service providers, and more. Our new products will make it easier for customers to solve specific use cases, such as metro data transport for data centres, on demand long-haul data transport, instantly creating secure and private networks with ease, cloud onramp, remotely connecting to internet exchanges, and connecting to third party partners and services.
We’re also launching a channel partner programme to support the growing interest in our services. We’ll also be hiring a channel partner programme manager to support our partners. Our channel partner programme should be launching within the next 30 days.
The PacketFabric team continues with strategic deployment of our network footprint in the United States with record speed. Our expansion into the Canadian markets is in full force, as well. We’re actively working on adding additional metro locations to our network, to reach new customer and partners, as well as improving our service offerings.
The PacketFabric development team will continue adding new features to our products and customer portal. We’ll also continue to develop our partnership offerings to enrich the PacketFabric ecosystem, providing a better way to operate telecommunications infrastructure for enterprises and other users.
Q. What are your expansion and development plans over the next year?
The emphasis of our next expansion phase is global. Over the next year, we’ll be expanding into several markets throughout Europe and selective regions in Asia. We’ve had a lot of interest from potential partners and customers outside of North America, and we’re excited to bring the next generation of networking to the global stage. Our intention is also to partner with MSOs and local loop carriers to reach enterprise locations beyond the data centers and carrier hotels that currently offer access to the PacketFabric platform.
Q. What new opportunities do you predict for the wholesale sector over the next few years
There is a large shift taking place in wholesale market today, driven largely by evolving and more complex customer needs. Customers will continue to have requirements of more and more capacity and will be looking for more efficient ways to procure and use those services. Traditional network providers and solutions are poorly equipped to deal with this surging demand in capacity and capabilities. Embracing new operational models that allow for more scalability, functionality and better efficiency of their existing services will pay large dividends in the long-run and enable the delivery of high quality digital services. To accommodate this shift, network services will need to become easier and faster to provision and consume, similar to today’s cloud compute and storage solutions.
Q. What are you hoping to achieve at ITW 2017?
ITW is the premier conference for the global wholesale telecoms industry, providing us with a springboard to meet new prospects, reconnect with customers and partners, and glean some insight into where the industry is heading.
We aim to show potential new customers what we’ve built and how we’re solving some of the oldest problems in networking, including underlying issues that go along with procuring, consuming, buying, and using network services, with a better and more flexible platform. We will also continue to build and develop relationships with our existing partners, as well as develop new partnerships.
