TORONTO – Internet Light and Power president Tristan Goguen believes large enterprises and mid-sized businesses are increasingly turning to best-of breed individual services over turnkey communications packages from a single telecom provider.
In an environment where Internet bandwidth demand continues to grow rapidly, businesses are turning to multiple networks – telco, cable, wireless, and satellite – to meet their applications needs, Goguen explains. ILAP is addressing this gap in the market by becoming a superstore of carriers and marrying customers’ needs with appropriate carriers, he adds.
“Think of us as the Home Depot of telecommunications,” he told Cartt.ca in an interview. “In a sense what we’re finding is that customers are picking services, they’re not picking carriers anymore.”
The centerpiece of ILAP’s superstore concept is its Network QUB (Quality Uninterrupted Bandwidth). It’s a two-router system that resides on the customer’s premise and handles unexpected network outages or disruptions by automatically switching corporate traffic from the affected network to a redundant or secondary network.
(Full disclosure: ILAP is the ISP for Cartt.ca. We do not use the company’s Network QUB, but thought it a good telecom story to tell.)
“Effectively, the client has the public Internet directly in its facility and if there is a circuit failure, then the traffic has got to transfer automatically between a primary and second circuit. It’s completely seamless to the client,” Goguen says.
The timing may be right for this type of product/service as well. The emergence and expansion of cloud computing among the enterprise community means they will require 100% uptime and won’t settle for even the slightest of network interruptions.
Any downtime is going to become extremely painful,” says Goguen, noting that its superstore model is “extremely agile” in leveraging multiple carriers to put multiple network links into a client premise.
Goguen says ILAP has a number of customers already using Network QUB.
While it may sound like it is reserved for the large enterprise community, Goguen says the product can be used by mid-sized businesses because it’s flexible enough to offer a variety of levels of redundancy.
“Traditionally the Network QUB worked well in a banking environment for example, but we’ve found that it’s easily doable for the average engineering firm or educational institution,” he says. “As an example, it can cost as little as $2,500 for the equipment on site and the cost of two DSL circuits.”
Jon Arnold, a telecom analyst with J. Arnold and Associates, explains the ILAP model is similar to BYOB – bring your broadband. “You pick and choose the parts that suit your business,” he says.
This type of do-it-yourself model may appeal to certain segments of the market, but isn’t likely to appeal to the masses of enterprise customers.
“If you’re inclined to do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s a great way to go,” says Arnold. “So people who use Asterisk and the Digium hardware products, they know you have to tinker to get the most out of this.”
