Q&A with Data Center POST’s Contributing Editor, Kathy Xu
Mariano Cunietti, CTO and Cloud and Hosting BU Manager of Enter recently spoke with Data Center POST about the company’s attendance at the upcoming INCOMPAS Show taking place April 3-5 in New Orleans. Enter views INCOMPAS as an opportunity to meet with current customers, partners and prospects in person in order to understand their goals and help them succeed. Also in this Q&A, Mr. Cunietti discusses Enter’s approach to infrastructure access, how the company is using the latest technology and Enter Cloud Suite.
Data Center POST, Kathy Xu (DCP-KX) Question: Tell our readers about your company. What do you do and what problems are you attempting to solve?
Enter, Mariano Cunietti (Enter-MC) Answer: Enter is an internet service provider (ISP) founded in 1996 and focused on providing network and data center services. Because Enter is at the crux of the network and data center, we are very interested in constantly enhancing these two services, as well as finding innovative, disruptive ways to approach them.
The two main industry problems we are trying to solve are disintermediation and sustainability. For disintermediation, we believe that software is the main access gate to infrastructure, so we are focusing our efforts on enabling users to securely access our infrastructure with no human interaction. This is evidenced by our recent agreement with Megaport, which allows users to set up an L2 interconnection to our network via a web console, as well as our use of OpenStack to provide public cloud solutions.
When it comes to sustainability, we think that the marginal cost of infrastructure, following Jeremy Rifkin’s theory, should be reduced to near zero. Therefore, our research focuses on finding alternative production processes that leverage self-production and interdependence. This motivates our involvement not only in technology (crowdfunding, makerspaces, and co-working), but also in the Open Compute Project, collaborative open source communities in general, and our deep interest in energy saving. These two goals have shaped our approach to the market: we deliver a very high level of service at a lower cost, and strive to be independent in production and interdependent in execution.
DCP-KX Q: How does ENTER keep up with the fast pace of technological change in the industry?
Enter-MC A: Even the largest multi-billion dollar companies in the IT space cannot afford to employ the number of developers joining the biggest open source communities such as Linux or OpenStack, which have recently reached more than 70,000 contributors. There is no way you can self-sustain such a large effort, and this is especially true for smaller companies like ours.
Additionally, these communities can easily permeate some of the boundaries of traditional corporate environments. This includes being able to avoid silos, stay motivated and communicate more clearly and efficiently. Communities incrementally improve the quality and the effectiveness of the software and technology they are built around. Everyone is working towards one common goal, and the result is everyone’s to use, improve and benefit from. Big corporations are also seeing the benefits; many have joined open source communities and provide them with regular financial and operational support.
DCP-KX Q: How is ENTER using the latest technology to provide the best infrastructure, network and cloud services for customers?
Enter-MC A: We have in-depth experience in providing network and data center solutions to the enterprise, providing us with insight into their service and reliability requirements. We also understand that their flexibility and ability to innovate quickly may at times be hindered by vendor lock-in — mainly enforced by their previous providers.
When Enter switched to open source solutions for networking, virtualization and storage, our customers began to witness firsthand the efficiencies gained by our migration. We challenged ourselves and our customers to understand that the same results could be achieved using commodity components and having open source software to manage the availability and resiliency of their services and data. Automation and DevOps methodologies did the rest: if you automate everything in software, you reduce the risk of human error when building critical services, and you enhance repetition. Enter provides consultancy and tailor-made, scalable services by leveraging standardized industry processes and tools.
DCP-KX Q: Tell us more about your Interconnected Cloud Platform and the company’s relationship with Megaport.
Enter-MC A: Our IaaS cloud platform, Enter Cloud Suite, relies entirely upon our European network, a 10 Gbps ring that spans from Milan to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and back to Milan. Since we own and operate the network, we can seamlessly interconnect our network customers to their tenants inside our distributed cloud platform running in Italy, Germany or the Netherlands. Megaport was a great opportunity to extend the way we approach the infrastructure through to the network interconnection, from customer premises to our cloud.
DCP-KX Q: What would you like to accomplish at your upcoming events such as INCOMPAS and ITW?
Enter-MC A: We believe in the market. Our company is not public or funded by investors, so our customers are instrumental to Enter’s steady growth. These upcoming events are a great opportunity to get more visibility, especially in the reseller environment. There are a lot of companies (such as service providers and system integrators) that struggle either to build their own cloud platform or just to become satellites in the global war of the big cloud providers. We believe we can provide a more humane, sustainable approach to IaaS by building relationships based on trust. These events allow us to meet with our customers, partners and prospects face-to-face, enabling us to understand their goals and challenges and help them succeed.
DCP-KX: Thank you for your time and best of luck at INCOMPAS and future events.
Readers, if you are interested to learn more about Enter, a leading Italian ISP mainly focused on B2B services, international IP VPN projects and public cloud offers within Europe, please visit https://www.enter.it/en/.
