* Q&A with Virtela Chairman and CEO, Vab Goel
Virtela Communications is a Greenwood, Colo., start-up that manages more than 100 ISPs worldwide to provide its IP-based VPN services to enterprise customers including Documentum and Extreme Networks. I recently interviewed Vab Goel, Virtela’s chairman and CEO and a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, about the state of the ISP market. This is the second of two ISP News Reports where I’ve presented excerpts from our conversation.
Q. What trends are you seeing in the number and kind of network attacks across your IP network? What are you doing about it?
A. A lot more of the attacks are generated within the enterprise network, within their LANs. They’re either coming from e-mail or from the server. I don’t think the core of the IP network is where the attacks are happening right now.
What can be done is that you have to have the right network management tools and processing policies in place. If a PC on your LAN gets infected, it will start sending a lot of traffic randomly on the LAN. If I have the right tools, I can see one PC sending lots of traffic outside the corporate network to other cities. If I have the right tools, I can go block that address on the LAN or WAN. You need to have automated tools and to be able to put certain policies in place within minutes on hundreds of thousands of routers. Your back-end systems have to be very, very strong to analyze the data, see a certain kind of trend, and then execute.
Q. What do you think is the most promising Internet-related technology on the horizon for corporate network managers and why?
A. I think it’s not going to be about a new application, but it’s going to be about convergence. If I’m doing video on a separate pipe and paying more, convergence is going to be the biggest thing. If the price of voice goes way, way down (which is starting to happen) then it becomes less attractive for the enterprise to say that from a one-time cost perspective I want a converged network. But if you look at total costs – long-distance from different carriers, local loop from different carriers – then it might be best to buy everything from one carrier. With convergence, you’ll get one pipe at a very low cost but you’ll have to reengineer your current network. I think it’s going to be huge.
Q. In addition to your role as CEO of Virtela, you’re also a partner at Norwest Venture Partners. What’s your take on the outlook for venture capital investments in new service providers?
A. I think we’re in year nine of a 25-year build of a new infrastructure. It’s going to take a long time for this migration to happen. It took almost 100 years for the telephone to be available to everyone. There are going to be great opportunities when it comes to service providers. But I think there’s going to be a lot more restructuring and a lot more companies going out of business. I think we’ll see lots of large names disappear in coming years.
Q. What advice do you have for corporate network managers in dealing with their ISPs?
A. There’s going to be huge instability among the very, very large carriers. It’s clear that people are still talking about merging them, selling them, them buying each other. I think you have to be very careful about giving 100% of your network infrastructure to a single carrier. You have to be very careful about how you select your carrier. I think you need to think about your applications, whether its ERP or video. Security awareness is going to be huge. Can your ISP help you when you need help? When you have a problem with your LAN, can you call them ask for help?
