In a post-IT Expo briefing, I spent a few minutes with Greg Hough, the CTO of GlobalCapacity, who gave me an update of the company’s integration with Vanco, a network integrator and newest contributor to the telecom access network pricing/integration/logistics services company. Greg explained that the network integration services business is a terrific complement to the company’s Saas and strategic sourcing operations and integration has been very fast. The network integration is an enabler of other business models and strengthens the company’s competitive differentiation vis-a-vis other Saas or virtual network operations company by providing a complete logistics operation.
Pendulum Swings to Enterprise WANs?
I have blogged about GlobalCapacity in recent months and in this update briefing, Greg gave me fresh insights about the nature of competition and how the access network is still the biggest bottleneck to effective enterprise network operations. In the past few years, large enterprise network departments have been largely frozen by fear. Fear of change, fear of commitment and fear of changing technology.
Greg’s insight is that the current stressful economic conditions have forced companies to overcome that fear and rethink the assumptions in the way they do things. For telecom engineers and managers this means that they have not only worked to rethink their enterprise network and operations, but they have acted and are acting on those new approaches to network design and operations.
Greg argues that the pendulum that had swung in favor of outsourced WANs through virtual services such as MPLS and frame relay are swinging back to enterprise-owned MPLS networks and operations. Customers have CCIEs on staff programming remote router backup processes, but are otherwise underutilized. They have the scale to benefit from lower cost services, 7×24 monitoring and faster responsiveness. GlobalCapacity’s unique knowledge and resources provide the skills to automate and coordinate contracts with local access providers around the world.
