Fill the pipes with services

Most people are basically lazy. We want our lives to be as easy as point, click, done. Now service providers need to tap into our lazy tendencies. And with the economy and the telecom industry taking a hard hit, determining what enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses and even consumers would like to offload to a service provider may be the provider's best method of survival.

While laziness may play a part in the offloading of some services to providers, handling things such as storage and backups externally can be more efficient, less time-consuming and even cheaper. The trick is for providers to gain the access and capability to enable and offer those services, which customers may not have even been aware of beforehand.

Providers such as Yipes Communications, which uses gigabit Ethernet to provide high-speed services in metropolitan areas, are looking to layer and deliver more services to existing customers and attract new ones. As part of that plan, Yipes recently partnered with several storage service providers (SSPs) including Progressive Technologies Group, Storage Access, StorageLink and StorageWay. Each offers enterprise services such as storage backup, disaster recovery and data retrieval.

The providers connect to the Yipes IP network, which is linked to the corporate locations the storage providers want to tap into (see figure). The SSPs are instantly linked to Yipes' entire customer base and theoretically should be able to persuade those customers to offload a portion of their IT businesses.

Using a direct fiber connection to business locations, Yipes can deliver granular bandwidth to its customers, according to Ron Young, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Yipes. And the flexibility of gigabit Ethernet makes things easier.

“[Storage service providers] buy service from us and can then turn around and sell to anyone on our ring,” Young said, noting that other methods of delivering high-speed connections to corporations are still very expensive. “Gig-E is simply cheaper and it lets the customer connect to multiple other service providers. When service providers couldn't change bandwidth, they couldn't sell services like storage.”

Yipes uses an interactive Web-based tool that allows customers to alter their own bandwidth. That, in turn, lets customers experiment with having more bandwidth one day than the next, which may better reflect usage patterns.

“We can do 1 Mb at a time and give just-in-time bandwidth where you don't have to buy what you don't use,” Young said.

The ability to scale from 1 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s in 1 Mb/s increments is a perfect fit for bandwidth-thirsty applications such as storage, according to Young.

To address security issues, Yipes uses a dedicated virtual local area network between the provider and the customer, which creates a private data connection.

Others agree that the cheap, easy and secure connectivity of gig-E networks is opening up new service opportunities.

Gig-E networks “are helping to define new services that weren't available before,” said Ian Viney, director of marketing for Luxcore. “Things like storage are opening up an entirely new market.”

But Yipes isn't the only company serving other providers such as the SSPs.

“We are in the business of enabling other providers like the storage service providers,” said John Kane, CEO of Telseon.

While Telseon and Yipes are enabling storage service providers, Young didn't rule out the possibility that Yipes will offer its own storage services in the future.