Leading the Telecommunications Revolution with GTT

Unlock the future of global connectivity with insights from Tom, a leading expert from GTT, as he unveils how this dynamic company is reshaping the telecom landscape for multinational enterprises. Discover the game-changing potential of the GTT Envision platform, offering unprecedented visibility, insights, and control over managed networking and security services. Tom takes us through the strategic philosophy that drives GTT’s innovations, emphasizing the flexibility and adaptability required to keep pace with rapidly shifting IT infrastructure demands.

As we look ahead to 2025, Tom shares GTT’s ambitious plans to further enhance the Envision platform with cutting-edge virtualized deployments and innovative observability tools designed to meet the ever-growing bandwidth demands of businesses worldwide. Learn how GTT is tackling the challenges of delivering optimized bandwidth at both the network edge and core, ensuring their customers remain at the forefront of technological advancements. Tune in to explore how GTT is not just meeting but exceeding customer expectations and leading the charge in shaping the future of telecom and networking.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Hey everybody , super exciting chat today as we dive into the ever-evolving and fascinating world of telecom and networking with a true leader in the field at GTT , tom . How are you ? I'm very good , evan . How are you Following you guys through your many acquisitions and incarnations over the last decade ? Really excited to chat . For those who might be listening and not be familiar , give us an overview of GTT and the core services that you guys offer these days .

Speaker 2 0:38

Sure , so GTT is a global managed networking and security services provider . We service multinational organizations , multinational enterprises , connecting people and machines to data applications anywhere in the world . We have a broad offer of managed networking and security products , including traditional managed networking , but also SASE , secure Access Service , edge , sd-wan , managed firewall , firewall and all sorts of other voice and connectivity services .

Speaker 1 1:11

Fantastic . So when you look at the landscape today , it's a pretty vast landscape in telecom and networking and cloud and cybersecurity . So how do you see GTT's sort of unique position there ? What are your offerings that you're super proud and excited about these days ?

Speaker 2 1:29

well , one of the things that is , uh , that is unique about gtt is that we are focused completely on serving that that global , distributed multinational base . So all of our products and services are designed for global enterprise and that is a core part of our offer . And in recent months , we launched our new platform for delivering those services , which is GTT InVision , and GTT InVision is the way that we deliver those managed networking and security services to our customers , and it's a great differentiator in terms of how we provide visibility , insights , orchestration and control to our distributed global enterprise customers .

Speaker 1 2:14

Fantastic . So what prompted the development of GTT Envision , what was the big idea behind it and what were customers asking for ?

Speaker 2 2:24

Well , gtt Envision is built on the foundation of things behind it . And what were customers asking for ? Well , gtt Envision is built on the foundation of things that GTT has been doing for a long time , so we have significant heritage in providing virtualized services to our customers . We've been doing that for more than a decade , and what we saw in the market was customers seeing demand for flexibility . Their environment is dynamic and they need IT infrastructure which can adapt as fast as their business is changed , and so our GTT Envision platform allows us to , across our Envision Core and our Envision Edge , to virtualize deployment of network and security functions and give our customers great control in how those services are deployed . And so Envision was a response to that requirement for a rapidly adaptable environment that changes as business requirements change .

Speaker 1 3:25

Yeah , dustrimmers are more demanding than ever . All sorts of new requirements on the horizon , speaking of which , you know we're in 2025 . Everyone's planning their requirements and budgets for the year . What should customers expect out there from GTT this year ? You know what sort of initiatives or enhancements do you guys have on the horizon ?

Speaker 2 3:50

Well , we're continuing to invest in our Envision platform , continuing to work on new ways to enhance the services that we deliver to our customers . So a core part of the Envision platform is our Envision Edge , which is our virtualized device that enables us to deploy virtualized network and security functions on our customer premises , and we're investing in that significantly this year . We are particularly investing in the deployment of some customer software in-house developed observability agent , which we deploy onto that platform , which gives us the ability to collect data about our customer environment , data about the network infrastructure , the security infrastructure , and stream that data into our core platforms so that we can be more proactive in supporting our customers , but so that we can also pass that through internally developed platforms to provide new actionable insights to our enterprise customers platforms to provide new actionable insights to our enterprise customers .

Speaker 1 5:02

So , speaking of bandwidth , you guys are all about delivering optimized bandwidth and you know more than I've ever known , probably , about that topic . How do you see broadband demand for enterprises evolving ? What are customers asking for , both at the edge of their network and the core of their network , and what are the key challenges you're seeing delivering to those expectations ?

Speaker 2 5:24

Well , I mean , it's no surprise to you or any of our listeners that the demand for bandwidth is growing , and the only thing that's surprising is that it continues the rate at which it grows . And in recent months , we are seeing lots of our enterprise customers doing new and interesting things with generative AI and that is driving demand for bandwidth as data is moved between models , and that has driven significant demand for bandwidth . And as demand for bandwidth increases , so does the requirement to optimize that bandwidth . And crucial to that is observability , which is a real hot topic in the industry at the moment .

Speaker 2 6:10

We see our customers coming to us and saying that they need to understand how their network and security infrastructure is performing , the insights into opportunities to optimize , and at GTT we see ourselves as uniquely placed to provide that data . We operate one of the largest tier one IP backbones in the world . We operate one of the largest tier one IP backbones in the world , and from that backbone we can extract lots of useful information that gives our customers the ability to optimize their bandwidth in the most efficient way , identifying where there might be congestion , what might be causing performance issues , how best to scale their infrastructure and , crucially , also where there might be security challenges , because we have a very broad security customer base and we see , through our tier one IP backbone , a very large part of the internet , and so we can give customers real insights into evolving security threats and how they need to respond to them .

Speaker 1 7:16

That's fascinating . I'd love some more color on the role of automation and AI in your network . Today you mentioned proactively identifying network issues . Can you even prevent outages before they happen ? And I imagine that role is only going to increase this year and next .

Speaker 2 7:33

Yeah , yeah , absolutely . I mean , we are looking , as many organizations are , at how we can deploy AI to provide benefit to our customers and to their users , and we have already deployed AI infrastructure into our core network to identify , exactly as you mentioned , identify any anomalies which could lead to an outage , so that we can address those anomalies before they become an outage . You know , real-time issue detection and predictive analytics allow us to identify disruptions before they are customer impacting . Uh , you know the best , the best , the best possible security or or incident ticket is one that never gets raised , and so we would like , so we would like to fix many challenges before they become in customer impacting , and the AI tooling which we have deployed already and are continuing to develop gives us that ability . It also enables us to automate responses to those incidents or potential incidents . It allows us to automate routine tasks around configuration management or security updates , to free up our teams to focus on providing more critical , more important services for our enterprise customers .

Speaker 1 9:00

Fantastic . You mentioned cybersecurity , of course , top of mind to everyone in the business . These days , not just cyber threats but network disruptions are on the rise . How do you think about advice to your customers for strengthening their networks and protecting their data and keeping that availability and reliability up ? Any words of wisdom there ?

Speaker 2 9:26

Well , we at GTT , we advocate a multilayered proactive approach . So this starts at a foundational level with putting in robust managed security services like firewalling , intrusion detection and working with a managed security partner like GTT , who has the expertise in building these for thousands of enterprise customers and can share the wisdom that we have from working on those environments . We also advocate implementing zero-trust security models across the estate and also integrating technologies like SD-WAN , which help with business continuity , ensuring that you have a reliable connectivity over which you can apply the security you need to stay operational in 2025 . The security .

Speaker 1 10:21

you need to stay operational in 2025 . Yeah , absolutely . I mean , sd-wan and virtualization are best practices , but it's amazing we have all these modern architectures and there's still a lot of customers , retailers and banks and many , many others who haven't yet moved to these more modern architectures . Any advice to transformation and getting started down this journey , because , if you're behind , there's a lot of catch-up to do .

Speaker 2 10:49

Well , absolutely , and for many of the engagements we have with our enterprise customers , it's how to get started is one of the big concerns . So that's why we advocate working with a managed security partner or a managed networking provider or a company like GTT , who can do both , and we have been through this process with other enterprises thousands of times and have accumulated knowledge and experience of all of the types of challenges that might arise as we go through that process , and so we can provide consultative services throughout the journey to enable and share the wisdom that we have learned over the many years and decades of providing these services to help our customers move to a true business class architecture in 2025 .

Speaker 1 11:53

Brilliant . Well , it's going to be an exciting year . Very informative . Thanks for chatting . What are you looking forward to personally ? Professionally , I know there's a lot of events out there coming up for World Congress . We've got in the US your Enterprise Connect and IT Expo , lots of others . But what's on your radar ?

Speaker 2 12:11

Well , I'm sure GTT will be seeing some of our customers at many events this year , but I'm personally most excited about continuing to deliver our vision of class-leading managed networking and security services on the InVision platform . It's going to be 2025 . It's going to be a great year , building on the technology that we announced in 2024 and previously , and so I'm really excited to see what our customers do with the technologies we're making available .

Speaker 1 12:40

Well done . Well , thanks for joining and just sharing a quick update and congratulations on all the renewed focus and success onwards and upwards . Thanks , evan , great to chat . Likewise Thanks , tom . And thanks everyone for liking sharing and we'll see you soon . Take care .