Virtela heads to Capacity Africa on a telecommunications safari (so to speak)
Virtela goes where our customers tell us to go. Picture these: amazing wildlife, very rich culture, scenic country and great people. Virtela’s Global Access Strategy team headed to Nairobi, Kenya for Capacity Africa 2011.
As Virtela’s response to the increasing need of our customers to push the frontiers of our network even deeper into the African continent, the Global Access Strategy team actively participated in this year’s annual Capacity Africa event. Nairobi, Kenya as the venue of this year’s conference is very apropos. Nairobi is reported to be the most populous city in East Africa. As an African hub for business and culture, it hosts over 100 transnational companies and is the site of the United Nation’s headquarters for Africa and the Middle East.
Managing 500+ carriers in over 190 countries
The Virtela Global Access Team, which is responsible for purchasing network services and managing carrier relationships, is working around the clock to improve Virtela’s global supply chain through tough negotiation with suppliers and through automation.
Purchasing circuits from carriers is a complex process since there can be hundreds of carriers to choose from and literally millions of price points to manage. The team has to buy cost effectively while simultaneously designing the network with as much network uptime as possible to meet the stringent SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that Virtela commits to its customers.
Avoiding network strain when moving to the cloud
When it comes to cloud computing, we’re as enthusiastic as the next guy. But, for all the good the cloud brings, the technology is not without its challenges. As more businesses turn to the cloud to take advantage of potential cost savings, improved IT efficiency and greater productivity (the list goes on), there are issues of which a company must be mindful.
One such issue is the cloud’s effect on a company’s infrastructure. It’s understandable that businesses may be inclined to ignore their networks when moving to the cloud. After all, one of the major points about the technology is that it lets a third party deal with the nitty gritty.
Is my network optimized?
To answer this question, a thorough network assessment is needed to understand to current situation of network traffic – knowing what devices and applications are on the network and how they affect network performance.
Specifically, the first step is a Knowledge Transfer engagement where we learn about the customer’s network infrastructure, network map, configuration, etc. before beginning the network assessment, as well as a detailed configuration and performance audit. As part of the program, the entire network is scanned to identify any chronic issues, faults, configuration mismatches, patch update history, network topology, etc
Isn’t MPLS a commodity? Isn’t it all the same?
This is a question we receive frequently from customers and prospects, and we would like to clarify on this misconception. How MPLS is implemented can affect the performance of a network.
For one, choosing a multi-carrier MPLS service can overcome single provider limitations. For example, a fully redundant, multi-carrier backbone network provides rerouting and dynamic failover across the best network path – meaning that the network can withstand anything from small performance issues to major infrastructure outages. Another benefit of a multi-carrier MPLS service is the consistent CoS (class-of-service) across multiple MPLS providers.
Why Managed Services Makes Sense and Saves Big Dollars
It’s been one of those days already. Forgot my security badge… couldn’t get in the building, had to reboot my computer twice (it’s been locking up more often), then spilled my darn coffee on my keyboard and mouse. I thought for sure, it’s fried. So I quickly dried it using a bunch of paper just lying around (I hope it wasn’t anything important, probably not) and checked to see to see if it’s still working. Clicked on the first email and viola, it still works and the email I clicked on was an Insight Research report.
It was a report on “Managed Services in an IP World: New Opportunities for Wireless and Wire Networks 2010-2015.” So I thought, let me read on and click/move around this report to make sure everything’s really working versus just a one click fluke. In the report, Insight Research predicted the managed services market will grow from $29 billion in 2010 to $47 billion in 2015 – about two to three times the rate of the telecommunications market. Interestingly, the report cites the recent global economic downturn as a major reason why enterprises are turning to managed service providers. MSPs save them money on internal staffing and also solve the intricacies of managing voice, data, and wireless networks. It’d be interesting to see how the stats change as the economy recovers. I sure know of more people getting jobs and even getting multiple job offers nowadays.
Virtela takes on the “Windy City” at IT Roadmap
This year’s IT Roadmap Chicago definitely had more emphasis on the cloud than in the past—that’s good news for Virtela.
Our VP of Marketing, Liza Adams, presented at the event and spoke on Using the Cloud for Faster Apps, Robust Security, & Proactive Management. It was reassuring to hear positive feedback from the attendees. One audience member applauded that Liza’s presentation demonstrated how to approach and solve IT issues for multinational companies, instead of sounding like a sales pitch.
The votes are in! Top 10 IT Priorities for 2011
More than 400 IT professionals at multinational companies responded to Virtela’s recent survey on top IT infrastructure priorities for 2011 and improvement areas for managed service providers (MSPs), and the results provide an exciting glimpse into the year ahead.
Topping the list of priorities are infrastructure management, security, data center consolidation, application acceleration and cloud solutions. Not surprising, really. Having just come back from PTC ’11 where cloud services seemed to be a recurring topic of conversation amongst our global partners, to the customers we speak to on a daily basis, cloud solutions are in high demand given their ability to deliver better, cheaper and faster ways to meet security, application acceleration and other needs. And with today’s IT leaders being tasked with security and compliance initiatives on top of the ongoing management and monitoring of networks, data centers, application speeds and overall business efficiency – it’s no wonder they ranked these as their top priorities for 2011.