For companies large and small, it is not always easy to know which connection is best for them. Service providers see it as their job to translate from the vast array of offerings to the customer’s needs.
Connectivity is essential to today’s modern business operations. It ensures that businesses, the cloud and data centers are connected in a secure and redundant manner. It is a broad term that manifests itself in different solutions, and rightly causes a lot of confusion for businesses.
“I often notice that not everyone really knows what it’s all about. When we ask customers what they expect from their SD WAN, for example, we sometimes get strange answers and it turns out that they don’t really understand what the solution exactly entails,” Freek Pauwels, General Manager at Citymesh told me during the roundtable organized by ITdaily. The other participants around the table also agree that there is ignorance among customers when it comes to the right connectivity for their business.
Fortunately, we have several profiles within the connectivity landscape at the table, who together can make all the ends meet. So we already got a better understanding of what fiber is, and took a closer look at software defined connectivity.
Around the table are Gilles Verschueren, Business Development Manager at Eurofiber, Kristof Spriet, Connectivity Expert at Proximus NXT, Marc Vandeputte, CTO of Arcadiz, Mirko Montorro, Sales Manager and Partner at Easi and Freek Pauwels, General Manager at Citymesh. Together, they flesh out the hollow concept of connectivity from their expertise in the field.
No one-size-fits-all
Devoting a single paragraph to the concept of connectivity would be challenging. After all, it reflects a wide range of solutions, and the connectivity landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. From GPON, SD WAN, to 5G and fiber, we’ve all heard these terms mentioned, or perhaps we use one of these solutions.
There is no one-size-fits-all within connectivity.
Marc Vandeputte, CTO bij Arcadiz
What is important to note is that there is no one-size-fits-all within connectivity, Vandeputte says. “An SD WAN overlay over a glorified residential connectivity such as GPON and 5G significantly increases availability, but can never deliver the quality that a data center requires in terms of latency, capacity, availability and packetloss.” Everyone around the table agreed that collaboration within the connectivity landscape must be central. “There is no single technology that can solve everything, just think of the incident at Pukkelpop a decade or so ago, where the Internet and cell phone towers stopped working,” Pauwels said.
Educating customers
Network and connectivity, to most people they are vague and hollow concepts, but to the experts around the table they are a daily activity. “In Belgium, the starting point is usually: who can offer me what at a specific location? Before, there was no intermediate range and now there is a very wide offer,” says Pauwels. So many companies are in the dark when it comes to connectivity.
“Just as people need education at home of what to expect, it’s really the same for business-to-business. Many companies want to be redundantly connected, but they don’t always know what that means. Only when something happens do they start intervening,” Pauwels continued.
Added value
The range of offerings within connectivity is growing rapidly, making it even more difficult for end customers to choose the appropriate solution. “We are often asked by customers what our added value is,” explains Verschueren. “It’s very difficult to convey a sense to the customer of what a particular connection means to them specifically.”
According to Pauwels, marketing also plays a big role in this. “For example, it sounds great to have a backup line on 5G, but in reality that server box might be somewhere deep in a building.” He further stresses the importance of a shift that involves working more from a business standpoint to create a dedicated business product, rather than a glorified business-to-consumer market product.
Translation to end customer
When it comes to guiding and educating customers, all the guests contribute to this story. Most notably, Montorro holds a key role here in his position as Sales Manager and is closest to the customer on the ladder. “Customers just want it to work for their business. We look at what’s available, and what the customer needs.”
A translation must be made from what is available to what the customer needs.
Mirko Montorro, Sales Manager and Partner at Easi
Furthermore, Montorro notes a striking trend: “Even the larger companies prefer to hand over connectivity.” Spriet further emphasizes that they need to make it clear to the customer what is the most important solution for them, without going into too much technical detail. “The end customer may not always be technically savvy within that domain, so we as service providers need to be able to offer the right solution that is going to fulfill their needs.”
While the rapidly changing connectivity landscape can be a puzzle for most businesses, sometimes it is for providers as well. They need to evolve with new developments and be able to make this translation to the end customer, for whom this is not a core business but just wants it to work.
This article is part of a series following the roundtable on connectivity organized by ITdaily. Read here more.