On a more intelligent approach to connectivity delivery

GNX is on a mission to deliver connectivity ‘the way it should be’, promoting transparency and simplicity – and is taking aim at what it considers outdated industry practices.

Squarely in the line of fire is the traditional SLA. Rick Mur, co-founder and CTO at GNX, argues that quantity, rather than quality, has been the norm. If the connection is 100% up, the provider is doing its job – regardless of performance. “That’s why I say SLAs are just a piece of paper,” Mur explains. “If you break the SLA [as a vendor], you pay a little bit of money back to the customer, [but] in the end, they experienced a big downtime if the SLA wasn’t matched.”

GNX’s approach therefore is to engage with the customer at the earliest stage. Which providers will be involved? What clouds are they connecting to? Is there any part which requires specific low latency needs? As Mur notes: “Would you rather have a quality connection that is up, and specific to your needs, or do you want everything locked down in the hardest SLA possible? We try to be smart with that, with our customers, and try to move away from just looking at uptime or bandwidth, and locking things down in a contract.

“We try to focus on quality where it is actually needed, which is in the technology.”

A lot of this intelligence can be gleaned from GNX+, the company’s all-in-one connectivity platform. Whereas projects usually ranged from 20 to 40 sites upon launch a year ago, today clients are feel comfortable looking at 200 sites and 400 circuits. Alongside scalability, GNX has its own monitoring solution which helps deliver insights on vendors’ delivery and network performance.

These data are all fed back to the customer. “We’ve really focused on data-driven decision-making and showing that to our customers,” says Mur. “That has been a major shift in the platform, where we’re now exposing that intelligence in our algorithm to our users.”

A look at GNX’s customer wins gives a glimpse into how the company is challenging the status quo. For one, a large chemicals manufacturer, GNX was automatically disqualified from the RFP for reasons of size. GNX ran the quote anyway, sent it over, and instructed the client to call if interested. Two months later, they did – and have since migrated their entire estate to GNX.

With sites and factories globally, Mur notes the snugness of the use case fit. “In a factory, if the connection goes down there, the production stops and everything comes to a halt,” he says. “So that’s where we see that our model really fits, with these companies that have a good global presence, with sites that absolutely need connectivity to run their business.”

Mur is speaking at the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo in Amsterdam on September 24-25, and is looking to emphasise that a different approach to procurement and selecting the right services is possible. “Be very careful about where your data is and how you connect to it,” he warns. “And it’s not about an SLA that gives you the highest uptime. It’s about quality that brings you there.”