Cardi Prinzi, President of Enterprise Markets at Pacnet, speaks to Jasmine Desai about the company’s network, growth strategy, and its latest offering for enterprise, service provider and carrier customers
What is Pacnet’s presence in the APAC region?
We offer network services and data center services. We are opening a 6 megawatt data center in Singapore. We own the largest sub-sea fiber in the APAC region. We are the only non-Chinese carrier to have a license to conduct telecommunication activity in China. We have an MPLS license in China. We focus a lot on MNCs and Asian companies that need support in Asia. It will tell them how much bandwidth have they got and what the latency is. Many customers are still going to buy traditional network services. But for us, it is bringing the concept of cloud economics to network. In India we have Points-of-Presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Noida. We work with data center providers. In those data centers, enterprises, whether they are a customer or not can connect to PEN (Pacnet Enabled Network).
We have a very robust backbone. We did a 100 gigabyte upgrade to our network system. We have multiple fibers coming to multiples markets all across Asia. We have actual fibers coming in Singapore from different location and converging in Hong Kong. We have the capacity to support PEN. As customer demand starts increasing, we will be able to go to these network POPs and put a PEN switch into the device in POP, such that the customer can just plug in. Even SaaS providers could access this to provide services to their customers.
What key reasons would draw enterprises to PEN?
Dynamically provisioning bandwidth across Asia is pretty unique. It really becomes network-as-a-service. For example, an organization has a data center in Bangalore and Mumbai. We will pre-provision PEN for a customer and they can specify the bandwidth they want between these locations and define their SLAs. With a click of a mouse the network will be up.
This is unique to other software defined network announcements. It guarantees latency and offers pay-as-you-use option to customers. Typically, customers buy private lines and pay for bandwidth on a whole. Pacnet customers can choose what they pay depending on the usage and get bandwidth, latency and connectivity as per their needs. It is an attempt to bring the economies of the cloud into the network.
How can PEN help when its comes to addressing the growing complexity in data traffic?
We expanded our capacity this year and believe that the ability to choose an SLA of their choice is the greatest asset we offer to our customers. We do not own and operate major DCs in India. Network PoPs are located in data centers in Mumbai, Noida and Chennai and we operate a small data center in Bangalore. We offer Ethernet, private line and MPLS connectivity in the country. All POPs connect in India to Chennai and through this, we direct traffic to Singapore, Japan and US etc. We work with Sify in Chennai and Netmagic in Mumbai.
What does PEN mean for existing Pacnet customers?
The existing customers of Pacnet can get access to NaaS easily. PEN customers can provision dynamic bandwidth within minutes either through Pacnet Connect, a Web-based portal, or via an Application Programming Interface (API), eliminating the need for manual processes. This gives them the control to customize and configure network based on their performance and quality of service requirements.
Customers can also get pay-as-you-use bandwidth-on-demand connectivity and network, through the hybrid cloud gateway operating on an OpenFlow based software controller. PEN allows customers to access major multiple or large carriers and data centers through the Pacnet network and create a virtualized cross-connected environment. For Indian customers, we see more demand for services back in US. The biggest challenge here is network stability. It is really important to have a robust IP network network through which to re-route traffic.
How is SDN a part of PEN?
SDN sits on top of the network and allows Pacnet to create Bandwidth-On-Demand through PEN. Consider a tap with flowing water, wherein, the tap knob is the SDN interface which determines how much water flows through the tap and customers are billed accordingly. In this situation, PEN is the pipe through which water travels through the tap. We are going to create a situation where it is bandwidth on demand.
