Speaker 1: 00:03 Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. Hi. I’m Max Clark and I’m talking with Jezebel Gilmore who is the chief commercial officer and cofounder at Packet Fabric.
Speaker 1: 00:25 Jezebel, thank you for joining today.
Speaker 2: 00:27 Hi, Max. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: 00:30 Can you tell me what does PacketFabric do?
Speaker 2: 00:33 PacketFabric is a network as a service provider that has brought to the concept and the best practices of cloud to traditional telecom services. We empower enterprise customers with carrier grade network service through technological innovations and our proprietary software development, packet switching, optical technology, and even business process innovations. At the end, we provide a highly scalable on demand WAN connectivity as well as secure, reliable, and highly performant network capacity to cloud service providers.
Speaker 1: 01:13 Basically, if I’m in a data center or in an office, I can use Packet Fabric to provision circuits between my data centers or between a public cloud provider in my facility or between another endpoint on your network and wherever I’m located.
Speaker 2: 01:31 Absolutely.
Speaker 1: 01:32 I think I know the answer to this one. But how would you say what problem do you solve?
Speaker 2: 01:36 Well, because we’ve created this SDN, this software driven network, we give our consumers, our clients, the ability to provision services instantaneously across our network. So they have immediate time to market. They are able to turn up services at the time that they need it, not at the time that the telco give them, which could be anywhere between 60, 90, a 120 days, the cofounders of PacketFabric were consumers of network services ourselves. And we have such terrible experiences consuming network service. You know, trying to buy a circuit from a traditional telco is a nightmare.
Speaker 2: 02:26 If you don’t already know somebody in that company, you have to find a salesperson who may or may not be responsive. And when you find somebody who’s responsive, you have to wait forever just to get a quote and then get through the legal process. If you want to negotiate, god knows that they come back or not. And then once you finally sign the service order, send it back in paper format, they assign you a technical project manager, and then you could wait until somebody’s finally available on their side to turn up the circuit. And if the circuit turned up and it doesn’t work properly, you have to wait for them to assign you another technical project manager who may or may not help you solve the problem and have to find you an engineer who could be available 30 days from now to help you troubleshoot that circuit.
Speaker 1: 03:21 I’m I’m having cold sweats and flashbacks here thinking of every telco circuit we’ve ever provisioned ever.
Speaker 2: 03:27 So and from our perspective, cloud, you know, in cloud resources in compute and storage had changed the way software development works. Right? And and so why not apply the principle of cloud and the best practice of cloud to network. So, we set out to do that, and so we created PacketFabric. Really, we wanted to empower the users, the clients who are using cloud services and trying to connect to their data center services to each other with a network that performs in the fashion of cloud and is instantaneous.
Speaker 2: 04:08 It’s hypercapacity, and that gives the end users a total control through our portal. Or if you’re more sophisticated, it’s a powerful feature to API.
Speaker 1: 04:20 I get the the story from, I wanna provision a circuit, and it takes forever to use a telco to provision a circuit, so there’s gotta be a better way. Or also, I’m looking for a circuit that’s not on a 36 month term, and I’m looking for somebody that can provide me flexibility on that. Like those 2 really resonate a lot. The question I come to is, how dynamic are your customers’ networks in actuality? I mean, if you need to establish connection between New York and London, or LA and New York, or you know, LA and a VPC in some cloud region, once you bring those networks up, I mean, how often are people taking and reconfiguring that and actually manipulating that and changing it or moving the endpoint to a different region or change it to a different office?
Speaker 1: 05:03 And what have you got what have you seen, you know, since Packet Fabric came online of people actually using your network and actually using this SDN to approach a programmatic network for themselves?
Speaker 2: 05:15 That is a great question. I have to say that we didn’t really know what to expect. We knew people needed services network services, and we didn’t know if people needed short term network services. But we wanted to give the flexibility and availability of such month to month terms. And many of our customers actually come on with month to month term because they’re not sure of the quality of the service or even their own situation.
Speaker 2: 05:43 How long do I need the circuit? Is the project going to be successful? And if it’s not, I will no longer need the circuit. Even sometimes the customers are undergoing data center consolidation projects. Right?
Speaker 2: 05:57 Merchant acquisitions. You just acquired another company. You need to be able to provision a circuit to their data center so you can start bringing their data into yours. But you intend to shut it down within 6 months, and you don’t wanna buy a 2 year circuit for that, but you want it having to have the largest capacity circuit possible. Similarly, for disaster recovery, for cloud service, if you’re doing you know, you’re turning up 300 virtual machines in the cloud because you really need it only for a very short amount of time, do you want a 2 year circuit for that 2 week project you got going on?
Speaker 2: 06:38 So we see a lot of month to month services come in, but that’s not to say that many of them convert to longer terms. We do see customers stay for a long time as well. So it’s still hard to say exactly what the trend is, but there’s a lot of different types of use cases.
Speaker 1: 06:58 You mentioned circuit capacity and circuit type for we’re not talking about just 1 gig and 10 gig circuits. You guys do a lot more than that at this point. I mean, this is much faster. So how what are we actually talking about in terms of your network capacity and what a customer can provision on top of Packet Fabric?
Speaker 2: 07:14 Wow. I I feel like you’re throwing me a bone here. So PacketFabric is designed to be a hyperscale network. We have multiple terabits of capacity across the backbone. So our at all locations, our customers have the ability to turn up 100 gig multiple 100 gig circuits instantaneously anytime they want.
Speaker 2: 07:38 And sometimes we run out of a 100 gig optics in a location, and we overnight them. That’s, you know, capacity planning. So we overnight 100 gig optics, and that only takes a day. The underlying capacity is always available. We are constantly monitoring and making sure that we feed underlying capacity into the network.
Speaker 2: 07:59 And at the actual PoPs, sometimes you get into the portal, you see exactly how many optics of each media type that we have. If if you don’t see the one you want and you like, you can actually request it, and and we’ll ship 1 out.
Speaker 1: 08:17 So I got this information from your customer, so I think it’ll be okay. A few years ago, NTT we all love NTT as a backbone provider. And one of the big issues with NTT has been the relative limited POP locations. So for instance, in Southern California, they’re in Los Angeles, but they’re not in Vegas. So we have a lot of large data center customers in Vegas who want to use NTT and can’t.
Speaker 1: 08:37 And it was always by transport, by transport, by transport. And a collaboration was announced of NTT using Packet Fabric to extend their service across your network to service customer transit access. And that was pretty surprising to read, but I think a pretty powerful statement here. This isn’t just, you know, companies using Packet Fabric to extend and talk to the resources in the cloud or or consolidate data centers or or things along those lines. These are service providers that are delivering Internet capacity or services across Packet Fabric to meet their customers where their customers might be as well.
Speaker 2: 09:11 Yes. And that has always been our intention. Packet fabric isn’t just a network. We are a platform. And that’s what inter interconnection is all about, facilitating the commerce between our customers, whether that you’re a service provider for Internet services, cloud services, application services, or an enterprise who’s looking to consume those services, or enterprise who’s looking to create their own private backbone over Pocket Fabric or even just to reach a business partner so you can collaborate.
Speaker 2: 09:48 Right? Imagine the power that one could have if you are collaborating with a business partner and you can turn up a circuit instantaneously, move petabit of data across network, and then say, shut off the connection.
Speaker 1: 10:05 This idea of cloud connectivity is not new. I mean, so we’ve we’ve got a few years under the belt with us now, and there are more and more competitors getting to the market of of offering this service. What makes Packet Fabric better at solving this problem than others in the space?
Speaker 2: 10:22 Well, that’s a great question. What makes Packet Fabric better? Our team. We have such an incredible team of people who come from all different disciplines. We’re not just a software development house.
Speaker 2: 10:37 We’re not just a network team. We have a business team that truly cares about our customers. So from our perspective, when you build a platform like Packet Fabric, you’re not building it. You’re not building just a network or just some software. Everything from layer 0 all the way up has to work in a cohesive fashion.
Speaker 2: 11:06 So what we’re delivering to the customer is a reliable service that they depend on to perform their critical mission critical business. So from our perspective, if our customers are trusting us with their business, we better deliver and deliver in the fashion that they demanded and the way that if I were a customer that I would want to. So with that said, you know, we take so many different things into consideration as we build the network and the reliability and the service offering. So it isn’t just our desire to build a network, but it’s our desire to help our customers be successful in what they do, their desire to be able to collaborate and connect to other partners that they’re working with, their desire and demand to have access to a variety of service providers so they can pick and choose from, not just on the pricing that those different service providers offer, but the different quality of service and different the specialty that those services bring. You know?
Speaker 2: 12:20 We have many customer that says, you know, I need not just one cloud service provider. I need many because the functions of my application, you know, part of it performs better in this cloud and part of it performs better in that cloud. And for economic reasons, I want to, you know, put all this type of functions in this private cloud that I have. So having the ability to tie them all together in a seamless fashion is the only way to enable the customer to do what they want, And that’s what we want to do, help our customers to be successful.
Speaker 1: 12:57 You have a significant investor who’s been who’s very interested in telemedicine and remote health. I mean, not just in the sense of, like, you can talk to a doctor remotely, but actually be doing robotic big surgery, you know, with with the doctor in a remote location from the actual surgery location. And so when we talk about reliability of of of providing and building a network and providing services, this isn’t about reliability to make sure that your your backup data shifts between 1 data center and your cloud provider or vice versa. But you’re talking about reliability from a, you know, can this network survive and and if there is literally a life on the other side of this link that that depends on it.
Speaker 2: 13:34 You’re absolutely correct. You know, we’re doctor Patrick Soon Shiong, who’s our angel investor, invested in the company because he believes infrastructure is key to both diagnostic medicine as well as the future of telemedicine. And so from that perspective, yes, life’s on the line. And with COVID going on today, right, you see the world demanding for more infrastructure. You’re right.
Speaker 2: 14:01 It isn’t Netflix that we intend to deliver. And and, you know, it’s those mission critical applications that really drives commerce for the world.
Speaker 1: 14:14 So who’s an ideal customer for Packet Fabric? I mean, what’s the profile look like? You know, if I was to say on average, you know, is this people moving out of data centers or people with heavy with multi cloud or people with multiple offices? I mean, what’s what’s that profile look like?
Speaker 2: 14:31 Well, you know, I I’d like to be able to paint a very clear picture and but let’s just say that anybody who has data to move from one location to another. So whether that is a financial company, a media and entertainment company, a technology company. Oh my god. Health care. We work with so many retail, so many different types of companies.
Speaker 2: 14:59 I’ll give you an example.
Speaker 1: 15:01 Please.
Speaker 2: 15:02 We had this company that signed up that I’ve never heard of. And I thought that our I thought our sales rep had to type old, you know, it was supposed to be 3 m. I was like, I didn’t know 3 m is still a company. Are they buying services from us? It’s great.
Speaker 2: 15:21 They’re like, nope. It’s not them. Someone else. I didn’t typo that. I was like, oh, what do they do?
Speaker 2: 15:27 They are one of the largest accounting firms in the world. They need this much capacity. It’s shocking. You know, so many people, because of digital transformation, need to have the ability to move data from one place to another. And so many of our customers come on with a single type of service.
Speaker 2: 15:48 Could be a point to point. It could be a cloud on ramp. It could be connecting, you know, multiple partners into one location. But the more they use once they get onto the platform, the more they love how agile and flexible the platform is, then they start using it. We see customer adding services all the time.
Speaker 2: 16:11 And as a network service provider, we have a net promoter score of 88, which is unheard of, I believe, in our industry. I was told the telecom net promoter promoter score average is, like, 27. So, hopefully, that’s a good indicator of how happy our customers are with us.
Speaker 1: 16:34 You know, the idea of network as a platform, I mean, this isn’t really new. But what we’re talking about really is new in the sense that the customer is in control. You give a web interface. You give an API. You give a tool that says, okay, you have a physical connection that you have to you know, bring up.
Speaker 1: 16:49 So I mean, there is a physical link, but once you have that physical link, you can do whatever you want to it. And the value of the platform increases as more things connect to it, more people, more companies, more clouds, whatever it is. And also the use cases of people doing things you weren’t really expecting. What’s, like, the most surprising thing that, you know, customer has used Packet Fabric for that was, that you were not expecting so far?
Speaker 2: 17:11 Oh my god. So many different examples I can give. You know, the the customer think about how they want to use our network all the time that we don’t think about. It’s public information I’ll I will provide it for you. One of our customers use us in a very innovative architecture to provide disaster recovery as a service to their customers.
Speaker 2: 17:36 So if you think about how normal architectures work in disaster recovery, your primary site has the connectivity to you, and then you have a backup site, and you have to source a secondary connection back into you. And they need to be interconnected to each other. Mhmm. And that’s a lot of extra money, especially for the backup site that you’re keeping that circuit around. And it has to be a pretty large circuit because when you need that backup site to be working, that better be working with a lot of capacity getting all of that data back to your site where your people are.
Speaker 2: 18:15 Well, they came up with an architecture where PacketFabric in the middle, and we tie those two sites together, and the customer connects to PacketFabric. So we provide and one thing that I didn’t mention is the services PacketFabric provide is inherently protected because of the any to any architecture that underlays the platform. So with that redundancy, all sites are protected on the PacketFabric network. And so each node has minimum 2 ingress pass, and we always have redundant hardware stack at each location. So the customer has ability to have full reliability at each site.
Speaker 2: 19:01 With that, you know, the customer can actually just connect to us once and reach their primary and the redundant site and have them be connected to each other all via us.
Speaker 1: 19:13 My my mind is wheeling. I’m looking for a whiteboard in my office right now because I wanna scribble stuff down. The idea around single point of failure and network link redundancy and these diagrams you get into with everything interconnecting every which way and eliminating that complexity and that cost is it’s a staggering idea to actually work through right now in my brain. Jezwel, thank you so much for your time today. It’s it’s been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: 19:36 I can’t wait to talk to Anna about this in more depth and, looking forward to learning more about Packet Fabric.
Speaker 2: 19:42 Well, thank you, Max. And Anna is phenomenal. She’s funny. She’s super smart, and I hope that you guys dive into the the technical aspect of how we do things. And thank you so much for having me here.
Speaker 1: 19:55 Oh, thank you. Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business.
Speaker 1: 20:08 Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
