By Spencer Willson, Director of Sales Engineering at euNetworks | 5 MARCH 2024
Imagine you’re a busy Infrastructure Manager, you’re trying to build redundancy into your network but can’t tell where the routes from your supplier actually are, or if they’re diverse from each other…
You’re waiting for your latest network service to go live; you’ve got a date from your supplier, but they were late with the last one, and you don’t have a good reason to think they won’t be late with this one too…
You’ve got a range of different cloud services on your network, and they all offer something different and valuable, but integrating them isn’t easy, and that’s before you have to think about the security concerns with the public ones…
These daily challenges don’t need to become regular headaches or issues for your organisation. Most of the time they can be managed and simplified with three main concepts: Trust, Reliability and Expertise from your infrastructure partner.
You might consider me a bit biased towards euNetworks, but I can honestly say I’ve never been in an organisation quite like it. Customers really are at the centre of the whole team’s focus. It’s why our customers tell us they feel a sense of relief when they know that we can deliver a solution for their needs and it’s why they encourage us to expand our network to new locations they need to get to.
Let me explain a bit more.
That busy Infrastructure Manager used to be me! For over fifteen years before my time at euNetworks I worked as a Senior Network Engineer in the financial services industry. Anyone who has experience in that market will know how absolutely critical network infrastructure is at a day-to-day level.
During that time I was the person worried about network downtime and disruptions, responsible for making sure our network had the lowest ultra low latency services on the market and that we had IT partners that I could depend on when things went wrong, trusting them to take our network problems seriously and solve them quickly. Time really was money!
It was only by going through the hard experiences of network outages, missed service deliveries and poor quality customer service, over those years as a customer that I developed a really strong understanding of what good network service looks like. There’s really no substitute for being on the other side of the relationship to help you understand and empathise with your own customers.
That’s where trust comes in. I’ve been working at euNetworks for over a decade now, and as a Director of Sales Engineering, I spend a lot of time with our customers, understanding their needs, and building or changing network solutions with them. These are critical systems, and there’s a lot of trust involved in making sure we reliably deliver exactly what the customer needs.
My time as a customer means I know about the support you don’t always know you need. I’m talking about the difference between being a supplier and a partner. Knowing the things you can do to make your customer’s life easier, that aren’t always written into an SLA or MSA.
Things like providing customers with accurate KMZ maps based on street-level knowledge of our network. We’ve always been intent on maintaining excellent network data. It comes from one of our core values of ‘being easy to do business with’. We know exactly where our network is, which means our customers can be sure that when we say it’s diverse, whether from other routes or suppliers, or from other data centre entry points, we know it is. What’s more, with KMZs easily provided on request, we can show it is. Time and time again.
Delivery of new services is always something that reminds me of my time as a customer. The times when a supplier over-promised and under-delivered were always frustrating and inevitably made things more difficult for me internally. A headache!
So, to be able to assure my customers that euNetworks can deliver on-net services in under 30 days is huge. I’m always happy to make that commitment to the customer because I know the delivery team and see how they consistently do what they say they will. It’s a source of pride for them that their delivery times are market-leading, and it definitely makes me feel proud to be a part of it and also confident that my commitments to customers are credible and backed up with results. Quite often we over-deliver!
I’ve personally designed hundreds of managed private network solutions for some of our biggest customers and they’re never the same, but cloud connectivity certainly plays a huge role in every one of them. It gives me a real sense of expertise to be able to offer a customer my advice and design experience on how to balance the benefits of cloud services while minimising their drawbacks. With all the potential pit-falls in multi-cloud design, what has proven really valuable is that experience of knowing what works and what doesn’t.
Multi-cloud environments can be full of complexity, simply because of the way that different cloud services have been added to a network over the years. This can add new capabilities but if your network hasn’t been intentionally built and architected for inter-cloud connectivity then you’re going to potentially find yourself running a fragmented, inefficient and costly network. It’s a bit like that sports analogy about having lots of talented individual players who can’t work together as a team.
Something universal I’ve found across all the different public, private and hybrid environments I have helped connect is that complex networking requires flexibility and choice. You need a network that’s built for cloud enablement and fortunately for my role, that’s exactly what our network is designed for. Our customers need to be close and securely connected to their critical cloud services, with low latency and easily scalable bandwidth. When I’m architecting a network solution I can rely on the fact that our network has over 180 cloud on-ramps built into a backbone of multiple, diverse routes, across more than 525 European data centres. 17 deeply meshed fibre and duct based city networks, and a long haul network spanning 53 cities across 17 countries.
Building a network is a big investment, and one of the things that has changed since I was a customer is the different options available now when considering ‘buy or build’ – CapEx vs. OpEx, build your own on-site infrastructure or colocate in a purpose built data centre, shift on-site workloads to the cloud, and many more options.
Helping our customers make the best budget decision is a huge part of these network solutions and when you build something that delivers the performance a company needs, as well as being more cost efficient than their old network, it really feels like you’ve helped create something that’s going to have a big impact on the customer’s future.
It’s been a long time since IT infrastructure was just a cost centre or a basic IT helpdesk. Modern network infrastructure can have a transformative effect on a business, powering cloud adoption and innovation, enabling automation and supporting expansion and business growth.
The right network infrastructure acts as an enabler, and what keeps my job stimulating is working with customers on digital transformation projects that are different every time. Whether that’s supporting them through network refreshes, migration projects to new modern infrastructure, or architecting new cloud connectivity solutions. It’s always different, and each customer has their own unique network and challenges. It’s definitely never boring! And the trust you get from the customers as you help them build something so critical to their business and that is such a big part of their Infrastructure team’s day-to-day life makes you realise how important it is to get it right and be a real partner to them. We focus on being a long-term collaborative partner!
I’m always happy to talk about networks, so if there’s an infrastructure challenge you’re facing or you think your network could be more effective or innovative or cloud enabled, then reach out and let’s have a chat.
Spencer Willson, Director of Sales Engineering at euNetworks
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