HITT The AI Network Tax: How to Sell Infrastructure Upgrades to Customers Who Think They’re Already Set

Well, I’m excited to introduce our advanced networking team today. Joining us, we’ve got Graeme Scott, VP advanced networking and mobility. We’ve got Jason, Haselhorst, our senior field solution engineer Jason Kaufman, principal solution architect and Brendan Gunderson, field solutions engineer.

What a mouthful. Everyone, thank you so much for being here. I’m gonna go ahead and just pass it on to you.

Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Cass. Great to be back. I think, we were saying earlier, think it’s been a minute since I’ve been on the call.

I think I, I think right towards the end of March was the last time. So great to be back here with all you guys. Thank you so much for joining us here today. We’ve got some good firepower on the call here.

We’re gonna hear from our sales engineering team, Jason Kaufman, Josh Haselhorst, and Britton Gunderson here in a few minutes. But first, I wanna talk a little bit about network as a service. So, or NAS as it’s referred to, n a a s, and specifically why this conversation is getting so much attention now. So, Chandler, if you wanna go to the next slide.

In our business, we’re really good at acronyms and marketing terms. And I know, Haselhorst, our man over there, loves to be talking about marketing terms. And sometimes when something new comes out, it’s easy to overlook it because of that. Right? We throw all these new terms out there, and then here we go. Here’s another as a service, that everybody’s talking about in the market. However, this one is a little bit different.

Why? Because it’s not just a new networking product. It’s not just a new acronym or a managed services with better branding. What we’re seeing is a fundamental shift in how customers want to buy, consume, and operate their network infrastructure.

And why is this important? Because our math tells us that eighty four percent of Telarus tech advisers transact on network. So this will impact almost all of you. So how do we get here, and what’s different about NaaS?

Well, the technology changed first. The network became programmable, software defined, cloud native, API driven, and increasingly automated. And once that happened, the way customers wanted to buy network started to change with it. So today isn’t necessarily meant to be a deep technical, dive even though we’ve got some pretty good firepower on here.

Today is really about understanding why customers are changing, where the market is moving, and where the adviser opportunity lives. So let’s go ahead to the next slide.

Today’s session. Okay. So here’s what we’re gonna talk about. First, we’re gonna talk about what is NaaS.

What actually is it? Because, honestly, the industry is still pretty inconsistent with this terminology. Then we’ll talk about why this model exists now, and that’s important because NaaS isn’t actually a new idea. The infrastructure to deliver it at scale is what changed.

From there, we’ll spend most of the time on our core thesis here today, which is the buying behavior shift. Because in my opinion, that’s the real story. And then we’ll close with where traditional networking still absolutely makes sense and what signals advisers should be listening for inside the conversation. And then finally, we’re gonna bring all the engineers on here to talk through the options we have within the Telarus portfolio and how they fit into that schematic. So let’s go to the next slide here.

What is NaaS? Well, NaaS, n a a s, stands for network as a service. And network as a service is the delivery of network infrastructure as a subscription model. Connectivity, security, management, and life cycle operations consumed on demand without the customer necessarily owning the underlying hardware.

Now couple of important clarifications. This is not just a managed service or managed services. Managed services typically me or traditionally means I bought the hardware. Now someone else manages it.

NaaS is different. This model is built around cloud native delivery, automation, elastic scaling, API provisioning, and ongoing life cycle abstraction. Also, this is not just SD WAN. SD WAN is just one of the enabling technologies.

NaaS is the operating model wrapped around it. And one thing you’ll notice in the market, which we try to tackle later on in this segment here, is the category has some pretty fuzzy edges. Okay? You’ll see companies like Meander bundling hardware, software, operations, monitoring, and life cycle management into a per site subscription.

That’s the blurring of the line that blurring of the lines is intentionally and candidly very smart. Why? Because customers increasingly care less about what box did I buy and more about did my desired outcome get delivered. So let’s go to the next slide.

So why is this suddenly happening now? Because the underlying technology stack finally matured enough to support it. A decade ago, networks were still heavily dependent on fixed hardware, manual provisioning, static routing, and appliance centric architectures. Today, networks are increasingly software defined and programmable. SD WAN pulled routing intelligence away from physical hardware. Cloud native infrastructure virtualized network functions.

APIs made provisioning dramatically faster, and AI plus automation are beginning to create networks that are increasingly self monitoring and self healing.

At the same time as all this was happening, customer pressure exploded. Organizations are now dealing with AI driven traffic growth, distributed users, cloud sprawl, IoT expansion, and massive staffing challenges inside of the IT organization.

And suddenly, the old model of buy hardware every five years and hope nothing changes started breaking down.

The same forces that transform how customers buy, compute, and use software is now arriving at the network layer. So, again, we’ve seen this trend before in other areas. Now it’s coming to network. So I said earlier that there’s a couple of different flavors of NaaS.

And if we go to the next slide, you’ll see what I’m talking about here. One thing that’s kind of important to understand is NaaS is really not just one thing. There’s several distinct delivery models emerging in the market, and the players in our portfolio often live in multiple models. Okay?

So the first one we’re gonna talk about is WAN as a service, and this is probably the easiest one to recognize.

This is essentially an MPLS replacement conversation. Cloud first WAN, application aware routing, and built in resiliency. K. Second to that, you’ve got LAN or sometimes referred to as campus as a service. That’s where companies are essentially consuming switching, wireless, hardware life cycle, monitoring, operations as a monthly service. Think meter.

And then over on the other side, we’ve got connectivity fabric. Right? And this is where we’ve got our mega ports, our eleven elevens live there. And that focuses more on cloud interconnection, carrier exchange, and programmable bandwidth between environments.

And then finally, we’ve got a managed NaaS overlay where providers wrap monitoring, life cycle management, orchestration, and SLAs around either new or existing infrastructure.

The important thing is here, customers don’t necessarily care which category a vendor fits into. They care about what problems get solved. Okay? So let’s go on to our next slide here.

NaaS is becoming a layered ecosystem, and this is where things kinda get interesting. Right? The modern network is increasingly becoming, this ecosystem, a layered ecosystem. Right?

At the bottom, you’ve got connectivity, connectivity, fabrics, and transports. Above that, you’ve got the WAN layer, then security, cloud access, and orchestration automation. Different suppliers participate at different layers, and a lot of them, as I said, span multiple layers. And, honestly, that’s sometimes why this conversation can feel confusing.

Right? Customers may think they’re buying SD WAN or SASE or CASB, cloud networking, or managed services. When in reality, they’re buying pieces of the same evolving operational model. And this is why outcome based discovery matters so much.

For those of you who’ve been to a beyond the solution event over the last few months, you know this has been a real focus for us. Because the adviser who understands the customer problem, the operational friction, the staffing pressures, the cloud strategy, financial priorities, essentially, what’s going on within the business will consistently outperform the adviser who just memorizes product categories. And because of that, we have spent a ton of our education around that. So I kinda started out by talking about how this record, this NaaS represents not just a change in technology, but a massive change in the way customers are buying technology.

So let’s talk about that now. So next slide, Chandler. This to me is the is the monumental shift here. Okay?

And this is really what matters because in many ways, the technology evolution is kinda the easy part. The bigger part of this conversation is that is a change in the way customers are going to buy these services and a massive disruption to the current model that a lot of us have, been in for a long time. So let’s go to the next slide.

Here’s how customers typically used to buy network. And, of course, this isn’t universal, but typically, it went something like this. Right? It followed a pretty predictable pattern. IT selected hardware. They sent out some kind of RFP or some kind of a request to quote, and then vendors competed on things like specs and pricing.

And then right after that came a very large CapEx request. Right? Hardware showed up weeks or months later. Internal teams deployed it, and then internal IT owned the life cycle or paid someone else to manage it for the next five to seven years.

And that model worked for a long time. The CDWs, the SHIs, those guys have made a living off of this model, and that was because applications were largely centralized, traffic patterns were relatively stable, and infrastructure changed pretty pretty slow relative to a lot of the other stuff. But that’s not the world that we live in anymore. Things have changed dramatically.

So let’s talk about what’s changing now. The next slide.

Today, the conversation looks very different. Network is so critical to everything else that goes on within the business. Now you’ve got people like the CFO involved earlier. Line of business leaders like your marketing leaders are coming here and influencing these decisions.

Operational teams care more about things like agility than than than some of the standard stuff that they looked at in the past. And security has become a massive part of the conversation and that ebb and flow between, hey. Evolving to meet the needs of our business as it’s rapidly changing and keeping that environment secure is creating a ton of friction within the organization.

So customers are asking different questions now. They’re asking why are we still buying networks like depreciating industrial equipment. The conversation is now ship shifting from ownership to outcomes, from things like hardware refresh cycles to things like operational flexibility, and from things like specifications to things like SLAs and experiences. And here’s kind of the kicker.

Customers are not necessarily doing this to avoid spending money, although they will always take advantage of an opportunity to save. However, that is not what’s driving this change. They’re trying to avoid things like operational rigidity, staffing burden, life cycle complexity, and long term inflexibility. That’s where the philosophy is changing.

So very, very important distinction. Let’s take a look at some numbers here to back this up.

As as as you would I’ve alluded to, the data really kind of supports where this is heading, and you can see some of these statistics here on the screen. Adoption intent is extremely high. A huge percentage of organizations are already evaluating or actively deploying NaaS models. As this survey says here, ninety percent within the next three years. We’re also seeing broader acceleration of OpEx consumption models since the pandemic. Right? We saw this with voice as everybody got off prem, and a lot of this stuff is now starting to hit the network space.

It’s happening across all infrastructure. And, of course, we can’t we can’t talk about technology today without talking about AI. AI is a major forcing function here because AI workloads increase data movement, edge dependency, cloud interconnection, observability requirements, and, of course, operational complexity. Many organizations are thus realizing, hey.

We can’t scale traditional operational models fast enough to support the needs of the business going forward. Essentially, we can’t scale fast enough to support what’s coming.

So does that mean that every single network opportunity is gonna be network as a service? No. Next slide, Chandler.

Not every customer should move to NaaS. So this is actually really key because you’re gonna see a lot of marketing and a lot of advertising forcing the the sort of NaaS conversation. And, again, hopefully, I just illustrated why I think it’s important, but not every customer needs NaaS. And knowing when not to position NaaS is gonna make you much more credible as an adviser.

So traditional ownership model still makes sense when you’ve got a cash rich organization. They can afford to be flexible. They can afford to make changes quickly. A highly static environments, not a lot of change.

Organizations that have a larger, a very mature engineering team or heavily regulated environments with unique operational requirements. So things like government, things like that. A lot of times, they’re not going to, be that interested in stuff like that. Very rigid and change takes a long time.

NAS tends to fit best where customers are distributed. Okay? And we’re seeing that a lot. Cloud heavy, resource constrained, and scaling quickly.

Okay? Also, where you’ve got customers that are struggling from an operational standpoint, you know, to to adapt to new demands from their team, that is where things like NaaS start to make sense. So important to note here, this is not old networking is dead. That is not what I’m saying.

This is more customer priorities are diversifying. Okay? Customers want different things.

So do you mind if I add something here? So one thing one point here is, like, don’t discount somebody that has a large mature network engineering team. We hop on with a lot of different large entities that have a massive, like, think of CCIEs, all the credentials across the board, all the different network OEMs, but they still wanna get rid of that low hanging fruit. And as they kinda define what they’re looking for in roles and responsibilities and the shared responsibility model of the network, they’re ultimately defining.

They want NaaS because they want somebody to handle that low hanging fruit, the proactive monitoring, the AI ops that’s built into the platform to keep itself healing. They wanna get that off the plate of the team that they’re paying a lot for to keep everything else up and running, the user experience and all that stuff. So don’t discount because they have a mature network engineering team. That’s still a conversation.

It might not be worded as NaaS, but it’s a component of NaaS that they’re asking for. And the built in tool sets and services that we’re talking about today is a great fit for them. And we and we place that all the time because once they see the value of it, they see how much how much effort is gonna be offloaded from that team that should be doing other strategic task. Now you’re hearing a lot of that AI conversation, offloading a lot of that strategic task, leveraging the NaaS solution set for that.

Yeah. No. Great point, Jason. And I think, you know, what I’m trying to say there is a lot of times you’re gonna get a lot of resistance from some of those teams.

You know, you’ve got that sort of entrenched. So just to be aware of that as an adviser when you walk into those environments that that sometimes those those new ideas, although maybe beneficial, sometimes you’ll get some resistance. So just understanding the landscape within your customer. So before I bring the rest of the engineers in here, I wanna go to the next slide here, just talk a little bit about the adviser opportunity.

So here’s just a couple of signals to listen for when your opportunity arises. Things like a hardware refresh, hiring struggles, slow provisioning, life cycle fatigue. Those kinds of things are what you wanna look for within your advisers. And sometimes the best NaaS conversation starts with, hey.

Why are you refreshing this infrastructure right now? What’s changing? What operational problems are you actually trying to solve? So, really, again, driving at what’s happening within the business.

Those are outcome based conversations, and I think that is really what’s critical to evolving in the NaaS environment. So next slide.

The network is becoming less of a product customers own and more of a platform they consume. And I think that is one of the big takeaways here is, that I want you guys to kinda think about. Right? When the the old model of buying stuff and keeping it for a period of time is changing, is evolving, and we saw that in other areas of the business.

It is now coming to network as a service. So, hopefully, I gave you guys a lot to talk about. What I wanna do now is open it up with our engineering team. And, you know, what we always love to do where possible is highlight our hub.

Because when you’re searching for you know, maybe you guys I I saw a couple questions. I think a few of you are like, well, Graeme, that’s great. How do I figure out who’s doing network as a service? How do I know who’s doing that? And, the hub is a great way to do that. We’ve got our matrix pro. So, So, Kaufman, if you wanna jump in here and just walk through a couple of the slides here, I think, Candler, if you go ahead and forward it.

Yes.

Kaufman said, we got a couple screenshots here of what this looks like in, Matrix Pro.

So I wanted to give you guys a, you know, a breakdown on how to find these NaaS providers, and there’s a lot of other valuable insights that we put in here as well. What we wanted to do is differentiate and have true instead of architecture and say, hey. Every company is gonna say, yes. They could do something.

We always had that joke. Yes. We can’t. Because after we get down and actually deep dive with them on how they do something, they ultimately sometimes they fumble and say, well, we, you know, we do it this way, but it’s not really this.

And by the time we get through that point, it’s not a fit for the customer. So we wanna make sure we break that down and give you those insights on what truly matters and who we’re in this case, who really does NaaS and the way that we wanna define it, which I’m gonna turn over to Britton here to deep dive into that because he’s our he’s our true network nerd here. We have a team of great nerds. Britain’s our network nerd.

So one thing we wanted to find here is how to find the NAS provider specifically. And there’s also other nuggets in here like Dark Fiber, Starlink, OneWeb, you know, those low orbit satellites, and also other things like MDU support. So we get asked for multi dwelling units who could support the multiple doors under the same entity. So all that stuff’s right here, but we’re gonna focus on NaaS.

So once you go into the Telarus hub, you’re gonna go up to the suppliers area, and you’re gonna click on supplier matrix pro. And that’s really gonna get you to this area to where everything is shown here. It’s gonna default to the UCaaS area. So if you see under the category section there, you see advanced networking.

So I’m taking you to the first slide that I just changed UCaaS to advanced networking. I know that’s Graeme’s favorite area, so we’re gonna start there.

So if you go to the next slide, after you go down to advanced networking, you’ll see there’s an area under at the bottom, it’s called service types. This is where that differentiation where I show where I was mentioning, you know, the different lower orbit satellites, the dark fiber, the m view support, but we’re gonna sit with this puppy called NaaS right here. So two different ways you could do that. You could go down under service type and then check the box for NaaS, or you could start typing in in that search field NAS. In the future, we’re gonna have a global search functionality where it doesn’t matter if you’re under UCaaS, if you’re under CCaaS, security, or whatever. But right now, navigate to advanced networking, and then you can find that little NaaS button right there, which stands for network as a service.

So once you click on that, it will start drilling down, and it’ll give you a a a differentiated view on who all can do this. And this is where you can start adding in your logo. You could do the exports. You can actually give something that’s cobranded to your customer.

But this will actually get you that educated guess. And by educated guess, it goes through multiple engineering reiterations to make sure that you have those NaaS providers that truly do this. And this is just a piece of the the spit out. So if you’re in there and you’re seeing all this stuff, we have let’s see if I can count this real quick.

We have over a dozen folks that actually have a true NaaS product to give you some true differentiation. So maybe somebody that’s already in the customer’s environment. It’s a preapproved list. That’s just an an upsell or something that gives more feature and benefit.

Or if somebody you may say, hey. This is a good strategic interaction that we should do. They they do a NaaS. Let’s show how they do it here.

So companies like Zayo, Verizon, eleven eleven, Equinix, Cato, Meter, Grafi, and a lot of the people that we’re talking about earlier do show up when you go into this checkbox area.

Yeah. Important. This is just a screenshot. Right? So this is a fairly dynamic matrix. So if you know, there’s a lot more in there than than than what we’re showing here. This is just a quick screenshot to sort of illustrate how to how to click the box.

So Yeah.

And it’ll also disqualify more if you click on other things. So do they do NAS? Do they support this platform? Do they do this as well? And you’ll start to see it getting more contained as it goes down. So, yes, Graeme. Thank you.

Yeah. I think we got one more slide to show, some more of the of the or maybe not. Maybe maybe okay. That’s it.

I guess We’re we’re very efficient over here, Graeme.

Yeah.

We have a very multiple slide.

So, Chandler, what I wanna do is if you wanna just bring down the slides here, I’m gonna bring in the engineering team. You know, our nerd our nerds unite, as we said. So Josh, Brent, welcome to the conversation. Obviously, I threw a lot of information out there. You guys, we’ve been sort of grappling with this internally for a long time is how is this shift in conversation that’s Has, it’s more than just marketing jargon, although that stuff gets in the way. Right?

It it it does. And I saw a question earlier, right, talking about, you know, platforms like like Meagan and platforms like all in one infrastructure as a service platforms. That’s NaaS. No.

No. No. No. That’s network infrastructure as a service.

NaaS, network as a service, is how I connect to things and locations and clouds and SaaS host and why do I connect to them and how do I connect to them and what regions do I connect to them. And there’s five different NAS platforms out there on the planet. I call them squirrels. I got gray squirrels, orange squirrels, red squirrels, purple squirrels.

What color squirrel does that customer actually need? That’s going to take a q and a to figure out. Do you need multi region, multi cloud connect? Do you need express routes?

Do you need direct connects? Do you need fully mesh? Are you replacing MPLS?

There are eighteen providers just in our portfolio that offer NaaS services. Our job is determine based on the use case, mister customer, which one is correct, and let’s get rid of the marketing terms, and let’s get into straight architecture. What are you trying to do? Where are your workloads? How am I accessing the workloads? And more importantly, what are the requirements of those specific applications?

Like, mentioned, I I saw some enterprise doesn’t do NAV.

I’m working on the simplest one right now to where I’ve got a manufacturer in China connecting to a workload in one Wilshire, LA and requiring sub eighty millisecond latency.

Good luck, dude. Yeah. That don’t exist because I can’t fix physics.

Or can I? Can I move that workload from LA to Singapore and let the people in Europe and Asia connect to the Singapore workload instead of the LA workload? Yes. Look at that.

It’s magic. I just fixed physics, but I didn’t want NaaS. Okay. Chances are your customers already have some form or fashion of NaaS.

And if we can get Britain Gunderson to mispronounce NaaS a couple of times in this conversation, I’ll give somebody a cookie.

And I want to because do it. I just there’s two a’s in there, and I I just want to see NAS. I want to. It’s inside of me.

I just but, yes, of course, I’m I’m gonna stick with NaaS today. Yeah. So, Josh, I think that’s one piece that we’re seeing is this is a cultural shift. We have these folks that have been system administrators in AWS and Azure that now that that vernacular and that need from an on demand type environment is pushing into the network.

So for me, that’s where this NaaS piece really comes from is that on demand infrastructure. People just want want programmability in in the infrastructure like they’ve had on on the AWS side. Now from the the components and the puzzle pieces, all of those existed, but the difference now is the cultural aspect. We want to consume it differently.

We want to be billed differently. We want to have visibility different. And and, Graeme, you started out where all of the infrastructure now is to a maturity level that everything can speak API to each other and start to extract what is really important to the business that makes it easier for a network engineer.

It’s you’re you’re just seeing these platforms grow into each other, not necessarily stay in their lane.

Yeah. And and they’re different depending on the use case. Right? Britain is you know, I don’t I don’t want NaaS. I have my own MPLS.

Okay. Cool. But I want a direct connect into Azure.

Okay. But you just said you don’t want NaaS. What the heck did you just say? I like, you like, that’s you’re demanding it. Right? Or the other one, I’m working on one right now this morning is I don’t want NaaS. I don’t need multi cloud and multi region connect, but I want my contractors to securely remotely connect to their workloads.

But but but I don’t want to talk NaaS. Okay. That is NaaS. And this is why I say get rid of architectures.

Let’s talk about architecture. Right? How do you need to connect? Where do you need to connect?

Why do you need to connect? And how do you securely connect?

Yeah. Speaking of security, Kaufman, a lot of questions in the chat here about is security part of NaaS. Why don’t you sort of tackle that a little bit and and sort of talk through it can be, right, but not necessarily. So, Kaufman, why don’t you sort of tackle with a little bit of that just, an overarching approach there?

Yeah. So it’s not full stack security. So when we look at telemetry, you know, you wanna get multiple points of ingestion. Then we’re looking at the endpoints.

We’re looking at every part of visibility where somebody could access the Internet or share some form of information or have access to data. Where NaaS comes in is the network component. So we we have the SD WAN component, which is dynamically, you know, routing stuff to make it more efficient, And then we have which which adds an area of robustness and redundancy, which is part of security. But then we have the SASE side of it, which adds the security component, which is the firewall solution that’s built in, that does that deep packet inspection, does the application gateways.

There’s all the fancy stuff that by that any type of transport of data gets bypassed through this firewall, gets checked, makes sure it’s legit, makes sure it’s going correctly to where it needs to go, and make sure there’s nothing malicious to the part of it. So there’s a lot of checks and balances that go into there as part of NaaS. One thing that where all this started was that single pass architecture to where not only are we doing the load balancing and the optimization, but we’re doing the security component all with one pass to one network device. Now NaaS adds that all in and blends it as part of the solution itself.

So to answer your question in, you know, four or five words or less, I can’t count, yes. Security is part of NaaS, part of the network security within that gateway.

Got it. So, guys, let’s let’s dive in a little bit here. Earlier in the presentation, I talked about different flavors of NaaS. And, Hasel, you kind of alluded it to it when you said, you know, meter network infrastructure.

Well, that is a flavor of NaaS, right, that we’ve got it. It’s it’s kind of under that. So let’s talk through specifically. A couple of key players that we’ve got in here.

You know, when I think NaaS, obviously, Lumen’s been really pushing it hard. Right? They’re they’re advertising hard. They’re one of the first ones to get it out there, but certainly not the only ones.

We’ve got some folks.

Britain, why don’t you talk through a couple of the options? You know, I I talked about those flavors. Right? We have sort of WAN, WAN as a service. We’ve got LAN as a service. Talk through a couple of the, the differences there.

Yeah. Graeme, You know, I I kinda put these in three bucket buckets. They kinda bleed into each other, but that WAN piece is really what I think of like circuits. So if you want circuits programmable, you’ve got Xeo, Lumen.

They put devices that are on-site. They’re programmable up and down. So this is a branch site. This is not a data center.

So if you have a hundred sites, Lumen would install or Xeo would install, equipment. Then you have programmable bandwidth, programmable functionality, reporting, etcetera, that just fits from a circuit perspective. Second, you have, what we would we would call cloud or data center to data center or multicloud. These would be your overlays.

Was just purchased by Lumen, or not purchased, but the announcement was a week ago, dollars four seventy five million for that infrastructure. Lumen is going hard at this. You’ve got Alcura, Grafient, Many of the other SD WAN players also fit in this backbone as a service chunk, what I would call. They would connect your multi clouds.

They may do SSE or SD WAN out to the branch, but it’s not the circuits. This is kind of the middle mile, push. And then the last piece is that land infrastructure. That’s your meter.

I would also put Meraki in this category. It’s a subscription based. There’s network. Depending on how it’s sold, that could also be in there.

But meter is kind of the example that kind of perfectly fits what that looks like. They’ll do all everything all the way up to the cellular components. So those are really the three that kinda stand out to me, circuits, backbone or overlay, and then land infrastructure. Those are the three components we’re seeing, and they’re all bleeding into each other.

So Yeah.

And I think especially when you think of the the circuit level, right, where you’re at at the branches, the circuit, you know, why this change in buying behavior is so important is because if there’s a real first mover advantage, I think. Right? Like, when you get in there same with meter. Right?

Once you get that infrastructure into a suite, people aren’t usually gonna rip that stuff out. If you think about your utilities, way you buy your utilities today, you move into a space, you just turn the water on. You don’t ask who are other and, I mean, there’s only one water provider. But, you know, if you move in, then there’s already a Lumen port in place.

That first mover advantage for our advisers to jump on this quickly, that’s massive. Right, Has?

It it is massive, and it and and it goes back to, again, the the application tolerance or the application requirements that that that I have in my organization for these business critical apps. Right? If I’m a if I’m a global company and I’ve got locations all over, you know, the the globe and I want them all interconnected, I wanna build the biggest, baddest network on the planet. Right?

So I’m gonna go get DIA circuits, multiple DIA circuits, DIA plus broadband, DIA plus point to point, DIA plus micro, DIA plus MPLS, da da da da. This is, oh my god, going to cost me an absolute fortune. The origination of NAS was why go buy all that? Why don’t you just borrow mine?

If I already built the biggest, baddest network on the planet, why don’t you just connect your locations to my backbone and let me route you? Done. Right? Easy, simple, way less more way less money and way easier to manage and definitely way more elegant.

And and, Kaufman, we’ve got some great names that we’ve added recently that kinda fit into this category. Right? Like the graphians of the world, some really cool stuff that we’re seeing out of those guys. Who else lives in that kind of space that Haselhorst just sort of talked about?

Yeah. Honestly, I’d like to actually turn this one over to Brenton.

Okay. You know, some of the some of the ones we’ve seen from a maturity level, you’ve got Meaganport. DRT has a fabric portfolio that’s pretty significant, Equinix. So you’ve got these the ones that have been sitting in this space for maybe a little bit longer from maturity spec perspective are those data center to data center type connectivities.

But, yeah, I think, Jason or Josh, you have other ones we wanna add?

I’m working on a a massive global rollout right now with Zen Layer.

Lumen is great. GTT is great. Megaport, like you said, Equinix Fabric, eleven eleven. These are all great for data center to data center, data center to colo, backup recovery archive targets, multi cloud connects. These are perfect for those things. A lot of times, these conversations are just over not over, like, physical layer two or layer two and a half, but just over software.

Yeah. And a lot of times, these conversations come in on, hey. I need dark fiber from this location to all these locations and also a connection in a or you find out afterwards that there’s also a connection in Azure.

So, yeah, I mean, a lot of the times these providers come out of the woodwork because somebody says, hey. I need this private connection here for a dark fiber.

I’ll come and do these really ever dark fiber.

We hear this all the time. I need dark fiber in these thirteen locations for this school district in Texas, da da da da. Do you have optical networking gear? What what do you mean?

I mean, do you have equipment that I can terminate these things into? What is that? Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That’s what that is.

So how about we talk about a NaaS instead of a let’s go spend a million dollars on optical networking gear?

Yeah. Brynn, how about this one? I’m not using deep Go ahead, Brynn.

Dark fiber? I love that.

I need dark fiber from Europe to to Canada.

It’s gonna be a long haul.

Find find where the data is at. If they have more than three locations, NaaS starts to become a solution that needs to be, looked into.

Yeah. And a great point, customer is always going to I see it a hundred percent of time. They’re always going to say, I’m looking in the blank. And and they’re they’re coming to you with a with a I need a wedding cake. And at the end of the day, what they’re really asking for is is is cupcakes. But we’re gonna go pitch a wedding cake, and that’s not even close to what they were that that’s not even close to what they need. It’s just what they think they wanted.

Yeah. And just to wrap up there, that’s why the focus on outcomes is so important, and we’re pushing it so hard. Guys, great discussion today. Obviously, this is something that’s gonna be evolving over the next couple of years.

I think there’s so much meat on this bone, network as a service. And, again, why I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention is this recommends this represents a pretty big shift in the way things have been done in the past and really, really important for us as advisers to get our arms around this evolving landscape. So, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Cass, over to you.

Awesome. Well, Graeme, Jason, Brenton, Josh, thank you guys so much. That was a really great conversation, very practical guidance.

Awesome job to all of you. In fact, this is exactly why engaging our engineering team is such an important thing for you guys. They do help win deals. They bring a level of expertise directly to your customer conversations.

You haven’t utilized them, please do. In fact, if you wanna see more examples of how our solution architects are helping advisers close deals, we do have our inside the win case studies. If you haven’t checked them out, please do so, and you can actually learn from real adviser success stories, which is super important.