M+E Connections

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is expected to be adopted by 15 percent of all enterprises by the end of 2024, up from under 2 percent in 2022, according to PacketFabric (pointing to Gartner research), during the Feb. 15 webinar “Edge to Everywhere.”

With the demand for a highly automated, scalable infrastructure still growing, Digital Alpha Advisors saw an opportunity to merge PacketFabric and Unitas Global to “create the next evolution of Network-as-a-Service,” PacketFabric said. Their intention to merge, subject to regulatory approval, was announced in January.

During the webinar, moderator Lisa Gerber, director of M&E partnerships at PacketFabric, asked panel speakers Dave Ward, CEO of the firm, and Carole Gridley, its chief strategy officer, why this is a pivotal moment for revolutionizing enterprise digital infrastructure.

In the process, they discussed the meaning of “TruNaaS” and how it revolutionizes business connectivity, how to reimagine business operations with Edge to Everywhere infrastructure, and the benefits of being able to design and control communication architecture without the burden of owning or operating any part of the network.

The merger is “so timely,” Gridley said, noting: “The market is so ready for disruption in the networking industry. We’ve seen enormous change through storage and compute, through the launch of cloud providers and we’ve seen the same” with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers “but networking has been slow to change.”

But the PacketFabric-Unitas merger represents a “very powerful combination” that could change the latter trend and the NaaS market, Gridley said.

The merger is the “culmination of software, refined networking towards a programmable internet,” Ward said. “It’s been a goal of many folks in the industry, many engineers, many business leaders across the industry…. These two companies coming together as one as PacketFabric really enables that vision, creates that vision, and puts a business behind it.”

He added: “We’re not just a small startup. We’re a really important and really potent service provider, and the only one providing real time on-demand connectivity, bandwidth control and latency services. I know we’ve said that a few times but, nonetheless, the Network-as-a-Service option on top of a network this size is the only one on the internet.”

Meanwhile, “we are finally hitting the point where NaaS is at a new inflection point,” said Gridley.

“Looking at how businesses are running SaaS in the cloud, serving that need over a static network, it just isn’t meeting the requirements” of companies today, Gridley said. “Today you’ve got multiple cloud providers, multiple data centers, all adapting to these changing needs and demands, and the traffic patterns aren’t predictable.”

She added: “There’s no one size fits all solution. So more and more we see this spaghetti bowl of cloud on-ramps and data center interconnections that have been put together on this kind of one-off basis over many years. And it’s increasingly not only costly, but inefficient. So we see that the businesses are really dynamic and in order to meet them, they need a non-static offering.”

TruNaaS is the solution, according to PacketFabric, which says it’s the first NaaS platform to “enable automation and empower real-time on-demand control from the edge to everywhere.”