This webinar features Graeme Scott of Telarus and Mac McClenathan of 11:11 discussing how to modernize network infrastructure for today’s cloud-first business environment. Graeme opens by identifying five key problems organizations face: networks that can’t keep up with business speed, lack of visibility into network performance, too many vendors creating complexity, inflexible financial models, and distributed workforces requiring new connectivity approaches. Mac then explains how 11:11 has evolved from a cloud provider to offer comprehensive network services, leveraging AWS’s backbone infrastructure to provide direct cloud connectivity, monitoring, and managed services.
Transcript is auto-generated.
Graeme is going to, as I mentioned, going to be joined by 11:11. We’re pretty excited to have 11:11 here on November eleventh. I’ve been geeking out about that a little bit. But they’re gonna spend the next little bit talking about how to build a smarter and more agile network for the cloud era. So please remember to drop your questions in the chat, and we’ll ask them at the end when when we have live q and a. So Graeme and Mac, take it away.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Jen. Good morning. I’m really excited to have Mac here.
You know, as Jen mentioned Chandler, if you wanna go to the next slide there. As Jen mentioned, today is Veterans Day here in the United States, and in Canada, it is Remembrance Day. So Veterans Day, of course, a day where we give thanks to all of our veterans. So for all of you on the call who served, I saw my man, WD, Marty, and Dave both put up their times on there. So, gentlemen, thank you so much. For those of you who have friends and family that have served, thank you. We appreciate your service.
In Canada, today is Remembrance Day, and I know we’ve got some Canadians on the call here. Remembrance Day in Canada is very similar to Memorial Day here in the US. And if you watch any hockey games or anything like that on TV or see Canadian politicians, They all have a red poppy that they wear on Remembrance Day, and that is a tribute to World War one veterans, based on a poem called Flanders Fields, which I’d recommend you check out. Really beautiful poem.
We learned that in elementary school, but so important to give thanks for all who served and then in Canada, those who who passed while serving. So thank you so much. So as Jen mentioned, could not let the opportunity go by to have 11:11 on the call with us today during the eleventh day of November. And, I used to pick a topic and then kinda go and find a a a supplier to work with me on it.
But as it turned out, this really worked out well because 11:11 is doing a lot of cool things that we don’t necessarily think them for them about, and I’m gonna bring Mac in here in a few minutes to talk through that. But before we do that, let’s kinda just go through what I’m talking about here. So, Chandler, if you wanna move on to the next slide.
As you guys have heard me talk about in the past, the way we look at connectivity has changed. So the way our customers are consuming connectivity, the way they’re buying connectivity, and the way they’re using connectivity has changed over the last few years.
And as a result of that, we’ve got suppliers in the portfolio that are changing as well, including 11:11. So what you know, Chandler, if you wanna move to the next slide, the network is and has been the business backbone. So this is the one thing that’s clear. I know a lot of our, TAs here on the call and and within the Telarus community sell a lot of bandwidth, and that is no surprise because bandwidth growth has been forty percent since two thousand.
So regardless of whatever technological revolution we have, technological change, bandwidth has grown by about forty percent over that term, and doubling bandwidth demands doubling almost every two and a half years. So regardless of what other technologies you wanna focus on, what other technologies you wanna sell, bandwidth and the network is the key and is the backbone to all of it. And I think those trends are playing out. As we’ve starting to evolve into a more of a a sort of a an edge economy, ninety percent of data is being created on the edge.
And that’s been a real change for our our customers out there as they are starting to change the way they consume network and how those networks must support their businesses. So one of the things you always hear us talking about is we don’t just solve sell products. We solve problems. So today, I wanted to take a look at some of the problems that our customers face when they’re looking at our network and looking at it through their eyes.
We’re gonna focus on a few key problems that customers tell us they have and how we can solve those problems. So remembering, of course, customers don’t just want circuits. They want solutions. So let’s go ahead and move on to the next slide there, Chandler.
Customers don’t want circuits. They want solutions. So what does that mean? Right? They they want a a solution to their problem. They’re buying those services to accomplish something.
And the gap between what networks deliver and what businesses need has been getting wider and wider. And a lot of our suppliers are starting to evolve to meet that need. Right? Back in the day, we had a lot of complexity.
We had a lot of things going on, MPLS networks. All these kinds of things were complex. You needed network engineers on your staff to kinda make sense of everything that was going on. Nowadays, customers want simplicity and agility.
So modern networks, the kind of networks that we’re starting to see and starting to sell, are evolving to meet that need. So let’s go ahead and dive into some of these customer problems. Chandler, next slide. Problem number one, my network can’t keep up.
And when we think about this, we think about speed. Right? But the first problem is when customers talk about speed, they’re not talking about, you know, performance on a dial with an Ookla speed test. They’re talking about business speed.
Can my network do the things I needed to do in a timely fashion? Right? So they’re not buying necessarily bandwidth faster is better, whatever. They’re talking about, can my network solve my problems?
Can my network do what I need it to do? Many networks are stuck in the past, and we tend to focus on things like speed on an ookla dial or whatever. Hey. You’ve got a thousand megs up and a thousand megs down.
You should be fine. But reality is what’s going on within the network, and what is it trying to accomplish? So we need to make sure that we are looking at it from that standpoint, from the customer standpoint. Speed doesn’t necessarily mean more bandwidth.
It means being able to accomplish their goals as a business. So let’s move on to the next slide, problem two.
I can’t see what’s happening. This is something that we hear a lot.
Visibility control, and it’s very tough to manage what you can’t see. Today’s networks, a lot of organizations are flying blind. They don’t know what’s happening. It leaders say that, they still juggle five or more dashboards to figure out performance issues.
Cisco, according to Cisco, ninety percent rank end to end visibility as their number one priority. So that’s a pretty significant change. Ninety percent. In addition, sixty seven percent of IT leaders are telling us that they have significant gaps in their understanding of their network performance and network issues.
And then this one here really jumps out at me. Forty five percent only discover problems after users complain, not through proactive monitoring. And, of course, that is not the way that we wanna function. When we look at things, we all wanna be able to anticipate problems and resolve them before they become a big issue.
Most companies are in reactive mode, so pretty significant. Let’s move on to the next problem here.
This is one we’re hearing a lot more of, depending on who you talk to. Somewhere around eighty percent of CIOs are trying to reduce their amount of vendors. Meaning, they wanna buy more stuff from a single provider, not have multiple providers all over. The average enterprise, as this says, works with between seven and ten network and connectivity providers.
Each has their own portal. Each has their own billing, SLA support process. That’s a lot to keep on top of. And, of course, when something happens, we get into this salute.
Right? Whose fault is it? We’re gonna point the finger at somebody else. So seventy six percent of CIOs are actively planning vendor consolidation to reduce complexity, and this one’s important, improve accountability.
Meaning, I wanna be able to know who to go to to talk about when I have a challenge. Right? I don’t wanna have to figure it out on my end to go, hey. Who’s where’s the problem happening?
So organizations are looking for partners that can simplify their vendor landscape while continuing to meet them where they need to be met with capabilities in the business. Alright. Next problem.
I need financial flexibility, not fixed circuits. If you take a look at everything else in the technology ecosystem, cloud, cyber, CX, All of these things are moving to a lot of consumption based models where you can buy based on what you consume. Network and connectivity has been slow to get there, but we’re starting to see that a lot more with things like NAS, network as a service, and all these different solutions. The network carriers are finally starting to evolve to meet the needs of their client.
Today’s CFO wants what the CIO already has in the cloud. Pay for what you use. Right? They wanna be able to know what they if hey.
If I use it, I’ll pay for it. And the good news here, moving to this consumption model is actually good for us as advisers as we’ll show you here in just a few short minutes. Next slide here, problem number five, my apps, my data, and my users are everywhere. Right?
This was really exacerbated, during the COVID era when, the pandemic when we sent everybody home, but it had been evolving in this direction for a long time where you’re gonna have a remote or a dispersed workforce. Now we know this story very well. We helped a lot of our customers through this during the digital transformation when we moved a lot of them from on prem, voice systems to cloud voice systems. Well, we’re starting to have to do the same thing with network now.
Things like SASE and SD WAN cloud based services are becoming a bigger and bigger deal, and eighty percent of enterprises are looking at adopting SASE or some kind of SASE element by the end of next year. One of the first slides I showed, it said ninety percent of data is now being created outside data centers and organizations. That means I need my network to be able to bring that data from the edge to me where I can do something with it. Right?
So there’s a lot going on. The question for companies isn’t whether to modernize. It’s how we can transform our network to match this new distributed reality. Okay.
So where do your customers feel the pain? It’s probably one of these issues. Right? These are the five problems that we covered.
These problems are not theoretical. These are the daily reality for our IT leaders. And when we think in terms of how our customers are thinking, the problems that they are facing within our network, it becomes much easier for us to have a conversation and bring value to them as a tech adviser. Again, this is where we come into play is we solve problems.
Nobody wants to buy what you’re selling. They want solutions to the problems they’re having. So alright. Well, let’s go ahead and open it up now.
I’m gonna be joined by my good friend, Mac McClenahat.
Easy for me to say. And, Mac, welcome to the call. I kinda just threw a lot of stuff out there.
But Yes. You did.
I think, clearly, you guys are are are one of these companies that has evolved the way you guys are supporting network and network services, and not a lot of customers think about 11:11 for network. So talk a little bit about what you just heard me say. You agree, you disagree, where you wanna poke some holes in it, and then let’s transition a little bit and talk about how 11:11’s delivering some network services.
Yeah. I mean, I generally generally agree, and and you’re right. I think that not a lot of organizations or not a lot of partners at this point really know what 11:11 is on the connectivity side.
And it’s largely because we spent the last several years, like, forty in the cloud space, but we’ve actually been kinda working this problem. You mentioned how solution providers are kind of evolving to meet the need of the day and make cloud connectivity a little bit more, not only consumption based, but keep that design in mind. I mean, the the whole, network expansion for 11:11 was really fueled, and I would even say, in some cases, funded by, Amazon’s need or AWS’s need for more visibility on the last mile because cloud providers have all we all have the exact same problem. If
your network or connectivity is subpar, then your cloud experience is likely to suffer. So through a partnership over the last several years, we’ve kind of not only grown our own points of presence, but built out leveraging their backbone and created our own points of presence and backbone to provide monitoring and access for them to get visibility on the last mile services so they’re not in a, you know, finger pointing game. So customers have the exact same problem. Right?
If they can’t see what we kinda sought in the creation of the the new or, I guess, modern 11:11 was combining the cloud and connectivity and security stories all into one dashboard. You mentioned, you know, the average looking at five. What we’re trying to bring is here’s a platform where you’ve got not only my virtual infrastructure running your applications, your data, but also network statistics, visibility, so you know where to troubleshoot and how to remediate sooner rather than later, but all in one console instead of the five that you mentioned before.
So observe observability is a big element to that for sure.
Yeah. And and, Mac, you talk up obviously, 11:11 with your sort of cloud background. Right? You talk about a lot of this in the context of cloud, and I think that’s super critical.
But it’s also important to realize that this same principle expands to things like AI, CX. All of these are services that the network is supporting. It’s the same challenges that you have with cloud. So we can look at kinda cloud here as a microcosm, and you guys have done some really great things with this, which we’re gonna hear about in a minute, but understanding that this expands out into all areas of the organization.
Oh, for sure. Well, I mean, think about this too when you when you talked about financial flexibility. Think about, you know, customers wanting to consolidate vendors, but what what’s the benefit in that? Obviously, single point of contact maybe.
Those are tricky problems to solve as far as support and cloud and network are different support structures, but think about in the context of an agreement. So if they’ve got an MSA and they’re looking for flexibility in agreement, if I’ve gotta turn down a location, I can now move money around beyond just the network connections. I can move them into storage and compute and manage services. You can move stuff around a little bit more than you might otherwise looking at ETFs on circuits where you’ve got a a evolving environments that’s expanding and contracting.
Yeah. Love it. So, Mac, why don’t you take us through a couple of the cool things and the unique things that 11:11’s been doing in the, in the network space? Introduce the folks here to, you know, obviously, thinking about you guys in those contexts and then and how you guys have been making changes to meet the needs of the customers.
Sure. If you wanna throw up that slide, are are we there yet?
Yep. You got it. The the your network offering right here. Connectivity.
Oh, another tab.
Didn’t see that one yet. So, I mean, this is traditional.
Here’s what’s on the truck. Right? So these are the circuit types we’ve all been selling selling for years and years and years. The access methods.
What I would say, these these aren’t new to 11:11. They’ve technically been on the truck. The the issue that we had prior to, and I guess what is new, is now we’re newly competitive nationally. So in pockets, we had a few pops in the northeast. Everywhere else wasn’t super competitive, and and that’s really the problem that we’ve sought to solve over the last several years before we launched it to this community at at large is the ability to compete, but also deliver some of these next gen services and capabilities. You wanna hit to the next slide.
I will hit on your your comment about speed, though, technically, I I like your your thought about speed and agility, but bandwidth volume has been pretty wild with, this year being my first time getting multiple requests for stacked up four hundred gig circuits. So that is a real thing. But, you can probably fill this out, all the the the there you go.
But like I mentioned before, we’ve kinda been working this model a little backwards, data center out to the edge.
Again, until we had the access agreements where four years ago, we had a handful. Now we’ve got several hundred. So the the the ability to compete across the country and even the globe now is a reality, and we’re starting to, definitely win a lot more opportunities within Telarus just based off of pure aggregation. But oftentimes, how we’re getting into those opportunities, well, I would say, historically, if we’re having a conversation about infrastructure or Doctor, you always have to have a conversation about access.
How do you wanna access that environment? Immediately, you get into the edge appliance that, that they prefer. Right? What are you running on prem?
What SD WAN solution? What routing appliance do you prefer? And oftentimes, maybe they say, hey. It’s a Fortinet.
Okay. Awesome. I can spin up a virtual Fortinet in my environment, either production or Doctor, to give you access and merge that into your overall SD WAN solution. In all likelihood, they probably didn’t have that setup.
So it led to more opportunities for the edge and then the connectivity. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last four years. What’s changed, I would say, from early or late twenty twenty four with the competitive nature, we went from maybe sell seven percent of the selling population with the partner community to, like, eighty five or ninety percent because now we can lead with network. And when it says, like, cloud first sales culture here, we can now pull those cloud deals through networking opportunities.
Because our guys historically have always focused on the cloud first, and it’s a great partnership for the networking partners out there that have a lot of experience that space. They’re identifying. They already have an existing funnel, within the connectivity world. We are finding those opportunities at a greater rate than I thought.
It honestly sounded a little market y to me when the the concept arose.
But then you start to see the deals happening, and it’s like, oh, this is interesting. And then the customer buy in. We won an opportunity, last month with Telarus that I think was about eighty three thousand that started with network or conductivity aggregation.
There was a private element to it where we did some VPLS, for their main locations. They wanted to run their own Palo Alto SD WAN solution, so we put NIDS out there for monitoring.
And the the story that they really bought into was already after that first network connectivity deal, there’s colo opportunity on the table. There’s a twenty k infrastructure deal on the table. So it is materializing in real life. It’s not just a marketing punchline.
The other element, though, too that I found interesting I mean, we would really position ourselves as a technology company. So connectivity is a part of that, but how you access these applications, how to modernize, oftentimes, you do need to dig into the weeds a little bit more than just, okay. Let me replace what you have today and do a deep dive, you know, audit of existing devices, look at utilization, you know, actually look at the architecture, make recommendations, provide the inventory diagrams, and really chart out what that modernization path looks like. Because, again, depending on the size of the environment, this can take a good amount of time and effort and project, and everybody’s gotta know what’s in store.
So before we put that remediation plan in place, digging into real advisory services, again, for the larger, more m and a focused organizations has has provided a a good amount of value. And I I I mentioned on that services before. Again, aggregation in the purest form is just reselling and and consolidating on a bill. What we’re talking about is not just that. Right? So that’s an element. But having our own points of presence in, you know, cities across the country and even the world, Now we have the ability not to just resell somebody else’s port for the billing aggregation benefit or a single point of contract for support benefit, but actually delivering our own IP, one, to make us more competitive, but also make us more flexible in how we deliver things like Direct Connect or ExpressRoutes and blending that onto one physical connection.
We can give you now DIA, AWS Direct Connect, Azure, ExpressRoutes all on that one facility and even, you know, deliver that at a multiple points of presence to give you resilience across the board, again, without having to buy six circuits to achieve what we can do on one. That makes sense?
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, the the key thing here, again, just to echo what we’ve been talking through is that it’s no longer just a one size fits all type approach. Right?
Each customer is gonna go and whether you come from the cloud, take a look at what’s going on. Hey. What are we consuming in the cloud? What’s going on?
Let’s have our network meet those needs or you’ve got the network first to start with. There has to be some kind of conversation, some kind of investigation into really what the customer needs in place from their network. Right? Nobody just buys network just to buy it.
It’s supporting something. So what is it supporting? What is it in place to do? And that’s really where we need to start the conversation.
Right. And, well and the ability to meet the customer where they are. Right? Contracts have all plagued this world.
So, again, kinda working our our old model, but it’s available now to everybody. But being able to just sell monitoring. If I can provide observability to a customer where they’re not gonna go stand up their own instance of Logic Monitor and hire a knock and do all that, It’s the same, same story we’ve all been telling about security, about, you know, building out your own socket. Are you really gonna do that internally?
If I could provide observability on an existing environment, that’s kinda phase one. We could take on third party circuit management to give them a buffer. Again, single point of contact, but not paying ETFs, and then we can source those circuits as we go. So there’s a lot of flexibility in how we can kinda modularly put this together, which again is is helping us win opportunities more often than not.
And I think that, kind of a I don’t know if this is a trend that you’re seeing, Graeme, but we’ve been doing a lot more takeover management of existing environments. Thinking like they have existing Fortinet. They have existing Meraki’s. They’ve got Viptela.
They just don’t wanna manage it anymore. So being able to layer the management onto an existing customer on appliance and then, again, work that process backwards, allows for a lower barrier to entry, and and an opportunity to expand.
Yeah. And you said something that I think I wanna just highlight again. You know, this idea that the contract is a limiting factor, customers just aren’t there’s not going with that anymore. Right?
Like, they they’re looking for a true partnership. They’re looking for somebody that, hey. I can work with as my needs change, and that partner will evolve with me, not limit me because of a contract that I signed for a circuit three years ago. Right?
I think that’s really the change in the mindset that customers have is I no longer accept that as a limiting factor for what I’m doing here.
Hundred percent. Yeah. Well and talking about contracts, and this is this is somewhat nichey. So I’m not I’m not trying to oversell this, but there there are some unique benefits in the enterprise with with AWS specifically.
Because we have such a tight partnership with them, and we literally have the ability to extend out from their backbone network to the customer prem. So think of the old way of, hey. I’m gonna go buy a Direct Connect. I’ve gotta find my way to a an on ramp facility.
So buy a point to point, take up some networking gear, then work out. So it’s like three, you know, the hands in the in the pie trying to to make this thing happen, and it just was kinda kludgy. With the the model that we’re running with them, we’re literally taking the on ramp and pushing it to the customer prem. So simpler access for sure, but what that also brought us was the ability to procure through the AWS marketplace.
So if an organization and, again, just for quantification here, that’s probably a company spending a million dollars a year in AWS.
I thought that was gonna be more nichey than it was. There’s actually quite a bit more of those than I was expecting.
But they all would find the the the procurement of network connectivity through the marketplace very interesting. One, it streamlines the order process dramatically because it’s already an approved vendor, if you will.
But it also goes against their spin commit. So if they’ve got a commitment to AWS, if you guys aren’t if if you aren’t familiar, it’s not like you’ve got a monthly commitment to a product set. It is here’s a giant pool of commitment. You can use any of our services over a period of time, and you have to get to this number eventually. Well, the network spend and I’m saying everything, just to reconnect. DIA, SD WAN, monitoring, management, all that stuff can be bundled and pushed through the marketplace that can make an enormous impact on helping customers bring down or negotiate better discounts with commits with AWS.
Yeah. And I think that’s just to kind of piggyback on what Wes said there about SMBs. Like, you know, more of the medium size of the of the SMBs, but, you know, that’s a big problem for them a lot of times is that commit. You know, they’ve got some assets in AWS, and they’re concerned about, hey.
I’ve I’ve, you know, committed to this spend, and I need to find some other stuff. I’m not gonna consume it all in cloud. So I think I think that there’s an opportunity there for, you know, your sort of maybe larger small business and medium business. Enterprise, they probably aren’t as concerned about it.
They’re gonna, you know, meet that need. But, really, when you get into that mid market medium type business, that can be a real challenge.
Yeah. One one to twenty million a year in AWS is probably the target for that concept with the for for spend commit burn down.
The other one, though, with procurement, think about this in the context of, like, the sled space. If they if you need a buying contract, you know, to to transact with the state and local government, AWS is on a lot of those. So that kinda checks that box kinda behind the scenes where you can pull the networking through the AWS Marketplace because it’s already an approved vendor.
Yeah. I mean, that’s a tremendous point there for sure. We we often get roadblocked into some of those accounts. Right? So cool. Let’s go ahead and move on. We’ve got some discovery questions we’ve got here.
And, Mac, these are ones that you guys have had some success with as you’ve been, you know, having conversations with end user customers out there in the marketplace.
Why don’t you kinda talk through some of these? What kind of doors these questions open?
And then we’ll open up to a general q and a.
Yeah. Again, I think these are more themes of conversations more than, like, hey. Go work this list and check the boxes. Yeah. But at at the end of the day, what we’re looking for, again, it’s not the old, you know, give me an inventory. Let’s see if we can save you money.
You know, let’s build out resiliency. What we’re trying to figure out is how is connectivity impacting your applications? What feels slow, which is, I know, an ambiguous term. But, again, we’re looking for monitoring assessment business. Obviously, how do we prevent you know, provide a more direct path to public cloud potentially?
That’s what we’re kinda digging into there. You know, carrier diversity, I mean, this is where most of the conversations start, you know, building out some level of resistance. So if we don’t have, I I I like to say, I mean, we don’t have to do everything to do anything. So oftentimes, especially as, you know, not someone that is historically known as a connectivity provider, we oftentimes start as a secondary. So, hey. You you I need I need resilience at these locations. Know, can you deliver here and be competitive and potentially help me manage, you know, the failover?
Building out and and kinda playing that secondary role is oftentimes the the first step in. You know? How are we reaching? I mean, this is actually how to turn cloud deals into network deals and network deals into cloud deals.
But how are you accessing these environments? That edge device is is hugely important in determining what’s next, and you can kinda work it into the data center or out of the data center. And then day two ops again, no no IT team is saying, have so many people. I don’t know what to do with them.
Like, the the trans you know, the the tedious tasks of, you know, management on the network, we see it a lot in the data protection side too. Like, who wants to manage backups? Who wants to manage, you know, all these rule changes in the next gen firewalls? Who handles that stuff?
Who owns it? Is a really telling answer oftentimes, and the willingness of these organizations to give over to a managed service provider is so much higher now than it has been really in my last fifteen years. But Yeah.
And obviously looking at circuit timelines. But my my bonus question down here again is just kinda, I would say, underscore, you know, a million to twenty million a year, twenty five million a year in AWS spend. They probably care about network burning down spend commits. It’s not usually enough as a standalone to get them to upend their network.
But if there’s an active network project, like, they’re actually evaluating or adding something, maybe it’s just, hey. I need a point to point from here to here. It’s a good starting point to just say, do you do you carry a spend commit, and are you on track to hitting it? And and, really, what that tells us is, you know, hey.
Do you know we’ve got a strategic provider that actually can pull your network connectivity through the marketplace and burn down commit? Would that be interesting? Again, don’t don’t kill yourself, you know, spending a bunch of time winning and losing those deals, but it can fast track a deal that might not have otherwise, gone our way.
Yeah. Yeah. A couple of these points that, you know, obviously, that two day ops thing. You know, Josh La Presto always talks about poor Timmy and IT.
Right? Like, just overwhelmed. We’re asking more and more and more of these IT guys, you know, and and there’s just not enough time in the day. That first point, though, I think is the one that really kinda brings this full circle.
Which apps feel slow? Meaning, which business outcomes and I am I not getting? Right? Like, I’ve got these things that I’ve bought or I’ve put in place to accomplish something, and those things aren’t delivering what I want them to deliver.
Right? That’s really where a lot of this conversation starts is you’ve purchased apps or whatever it is to to deliver a business outcome, and there’s challenges meeting that outcome. So great conversation starters here to get going. Let’s go ahead and bring Jen back in.
Jen, you, like, knew where I was going with that. You were on camera right away.
I did. I was waiting.
Yeah. Very active chat session here. So let’s see what we can get to. And, Mac, you’re you’re coming here and join some of this with us as well. Let’s see if we can handle some of these questions. We might have lost Mac here. Oh, there he is.
He’s I think he’s here. He just turned off his camera. There we go. Hi, Mac.
I thought I I thought I was getting ready to get the boot, but I can definitely do not leave.
We have a couple of questions for you. I I actually Graeme and Mac, thank you very much for that presentation. I thought that slide that you had, Graeme, at the end of your opening presentation with the five pain point areas is would be a super helpful discovery slide for folks to have because it would allow for, customers to to point to the places where they’re actually experiencing pain. So in that thing, Mac, where you said, hey.
What feels slow? One of those pain points was speed and all that kind of stuff. It would be a great door opener. So, we’re gonna make these slides available through Telarus University.
And, Mac, if you’re open, we can include your slides in there too because there have been a bunch of questions. Okay. Fantastic. So let me ask you a couple of these questions.
When you drop site or circuit services and add another location, is it coterminous with the existing contract dates, or does it extend the contract term to add a new location?
It’s negotiable. Okay. So there’s there’s no there’s not a single answer to that. It kinda just depends on the the initial terms of the contract and then what we’re trying to achieve long term. So if we’ve got a customer that, you know, wants to dig in and be more strategic and road map and plan, there’s a lot more flexibility in the agreement. As it’s written, it would just be, you know, pay ETF, add a new one, but there’s a lot of contracts flexibility, if we’re having conversations about, you know, future growth expansion.
Okay. There was also a question in here about do you guys have your own network?
Yeah. So I was I was the one I was trying to type, but, obviously, that one, yes. We do have our own backbone.
You you probably kinda picked up on this, but this is definitely a new contact or concept, and we are the only one positioned this way. But, largely, our network backbone is AWS’s backbone. So if you think about that from size scope globally, they probably have one of the top three global backbone networks in the world. They own and run their own fiber environments.
They connect each availability zone with four separate routes in. So if you think of fiber cut, the Red Sea fiber cut, both of them in the last six months, they were unaffected by that. So what we’re actually bringing to market is AWS’s backbone. We also have some other elements that were built out adjacent, but with access to that, it’s a new resilient route that this community has never had access to sell before.
If you think of even national but even global, we’re taking a different path. And as other connectivity providers continue to consolidate, this conversation will actually probably get a little bit more interest in the business community because it it speaks directly to resilience and diversity of paths.
Okay. I I think I’ve got one more question for you that was just you you gave us a lot of great discovery questions and ways that people could open conversation.
If if a Bluebird came to you, which is ironic because I’m about to talk about Bluebird, the the supplier next. But if a Bluebird deal came your way and it was exactly the right business problem presented on a plate for you that would allow a land and expand into your portfolio of offerings, what would that look like? What what what kinds of questions should or problems should people be listening for to start the right start in the the right use case for expansion deals?
That’s super broad, but I will tell you that where we’re seeing most of the activity and a lot of value add right now is m and a. So high growth organizations that continue to acquire that that use case I gave you earlier, you know, eighty three grand. I mean, that started with, I’ve got all these companies. I have no standard as far as, like, edge environments.
How do I blend this environment, standardize across all these new acquisitions, ingest them faster? So we’re adding that layer of support to the networking team. Even if they, in this case, they wanna run their own edge appliance, we’re still managing all the network growth, and monitoring on their behalf, as they expand through acquisition. So speeding up consolidation, helping with, consulting services, all of those things are are great fits for big strategic deals.
Great. Thanks. Graeme, do you have any more questions for Mac?
No. No. I think just a a great session. And, again, I just wanna encourage everybody out there to start looking at this a little bit differently.
You know, that point about the contract that we talked about earlier, I think that to me is really indicative of the change here is that organizations are refusing to be limited by a contract term or whatever with their network. They want that to be agile. They want the ability to make changes, and we’re starting to see the enterprise organizations really lean in hard with these type of services, and we know from experience that that’s eventually gonna start to trickle down to our small, medium, mid market businesses as well. So just, you know, the type of thing that we wanna keep an eye focusing on those business outcomes, and then making sure that our network services can support them.
Can I can I put a punch line on that one real quick?
Please.
Because there are this is the best time in the world to have this multi service contract conversation with all the external pressures. So think you got, like, two to five percent colo availability in the United States. You’ve got all the Broadcom madness where organizations are trying to figure out, do I optimize? Do I exit? There’s change happening everywhere. So the ability to shift, spend, and move it around to different technology pillars is, is allowing us to play in deals that we may not have otherwise played in.
So Love it.
Just love it.