network-as-a-service
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Graphiant and the Network That Forgot
Khalid Raza helped make SD-WAN a business. His next company puts less memory in the network’s middle - and asks why connecting a cloud should require so much machinery.
The Internet Should Come With the Building
Meter sells a peculiar promise: move into an office, turn on the network, and leave the machinery to someone else. The company that began by building its own switches now wants connectivity to be part of the lease.
Ali Shaikh and the Price of a Packet
The Graphiant CEO has spent his career making networks less visible to the people who depend on them. His latest wager is that AI will make the plumbing matter more - and the old price tags matter less.
The Cloud Has an API. Console Connect Wants the Network to Have One Too.
Console Connect puts a cloud-style control panel on PCCW Global's private backbone. The result is a network you can order in clicks - provided the fibre, ports and last mile are already where you need them.
Hiro Notaney Makes Invisible Infrastructure Make Sense
After a career spanning airlines, optical networks, connected devices, contracts and cloud infrastructure, Alkira CMO Hiro Notaney has kept one idea in his carry-on: trust is the only marketing asset that compounds.
Boingo’s $854 Million Lesson for Infrastructure Builders: Own the Places Where Wireless Breaks
Boingo began by making airport Wi-Fi easier to buy. Twenty-five years later, its real product is the invisible layer beneath airports, bases and ballparks - a lesson in moving from a convenient app to infrastructure that is painful to replace.
Lumen Technologies
A Louisiana telephone descendant is wagering that the most valuable layer of AI may be the glass beneath it. Lumen is turning a sprawling fiber backbone into a programmable network enterprises can switch on in minutes.
Nile
Nile is a San Jose-based Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) company founded in 2018 by former Cisco leaders Pankaj Patel and John Chambers, along with Suresh Katukam and Sri Hosakote. It replaces the traditional buy-and-manage model for enterprise wired and wireless LANs with a cloud-delivered subscription that bundles hardware, software, zero-trust security, AI-driven automation, and performance guarantees. Nile designs, deploys, monitors, and continuously optimizes campus networks so IT teams no longer have to, targeting the roughly $75B enterprises spend each year running networks.
Megaport
Megaport is an Australian network-as-a-service company that lets enterprises spin up private, high-speed connections between data centers and the major public clouds in minutes rather than months. Through a software-defined network spanning more than 1,100 enabled data centers across some 30 countries, Megaport replaces the fixed contracts and manual provisioning of traditional telecom with on-demand, elastic bandwidth billed by the hour. Its platform - centered on Virtual Cross Connects, the Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge - connects over 4,000 customers to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hundreds of other providers. Listed on the ASX as MP1, the company is now extending from connectivity into compute as it builds toward a globally distributed AI inference cloud.
Karl Meyer
Karl Meyer is General Partner and Managing Director, Head of Global Portfolio Operations at Digital Alpha, an alternative asset manager focused on digital infrastructure - the backbone of the digital economy spanning next-generation networks, cloud, and IoT/Smart Cities. Bringing two decades of enterprise technology experience from Cisco, Kleiner Perkins, HPE, and Incorta, Meyer joined Digital Alpha in October 2021 to build a world-class operations function and drive measurable value creation across the firm's portfolio companies. He currently serves on the boards of Energybox and PacketFabric, where his enterprise software and go-to-market expertise helps portfolio companies scale into Global 2,000 accounts.
Michael Reid
Michael Reid is the CEO and Executive Director of Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service platform operating across roughly 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. A Brisbane-born aerospace engineer turned tech sales leader, Reid spent 15 years at Cisco - most recently as CRO of ThousandEyes, where he grew ARR by 2.4x and scaled the team from 150 to nearly 400 people. Since taking Megaport's helm in May 2023, he has led the company to its first-ever profit after tax (FY24), grown Customer Lifetime Value 50% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and repositioned Megaport as the backbone for AI-era enterprise connectivity.