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.
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.
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.