Nexagent Ready for Business Following Completion of Successful Six Month Live Service Testing

New methodology reduces telecom costs and improves service for global enterprises, opening up a $12bn opportunity for carriers

London – 22 August, 2003 - Nexagent announced today that its patent pending Nexagent System is ready for service, enabling an entirely new way of delivering multi-carrier wide area networks to global enterprises. This follows three years of research and development, eighteen months of rigorous testing, six months of live service testing and an alliance with a major global systems integrator. Nexagent’s innovative solution for the first time enables integrators to provide enterprises with the optimal, globally managed and monitored IP (Internet Protocol) network delivering voice, video, and data – and opens a $12bn opportunity for carriers. Integrators use the Nexagent System to select the best-fit managed IP carrier in each of the enterprise’s locations, and interconnect and independently monitor these carriers using shared Nexagent Peering Points in key cities around the world.

Charlie Muirhead, president and founder of Nexagent, comments: "It is clear multi-carrier networks are here to stay and this is the first time a solution has been purpose built to improve their delivery. With the completion of these tests we are now focused on our engagements with some of the largest global enterprises. These enterprises understand how a Nexagent based solution can cut costs and drive real business benefits such as simplifying: application rollout across partners, data centre consolidation, disaster recovery strategies, convergence and migration to a utility computing model."

”Many large multi-national organizations are building global wide area networks with carrier provided data communication layer 2 services, and internally take the responsibility of establishing seamless IP services themselves. Our clients experiences are indicating high degrees of labour intensive work and complex infrastructure to keep multi-carrier integrated networks performing correctly. Some clients are beginning to trust and out task more service to a limited number of global carriers, but we also expect in 2004/05 a rising number of network integrators to leverage emerging technologies that offer companies more carrier network choices, having varying degrees of cost, security, service and reliability, and concurrently greatly reduce the operational costs of managing a global multi-carrier network.” Larry Velez of META Group.

The daunting reality is that most enterprises must deal with the complex integration of multiple telecoms carriers, due to three key issues: The single global super-carrier has proven not to be economically viable - even the largest carriers are using international, regional and local carriers to provide coverage where their own networks cannot. The extended enterprise will almost always involve multiple carriers as there is unlikely to be agreement ‘across the board’ to use the same carrier. Finally, many global enterprises are now required to use multiple carriers to avoid a situation of dependency on any one single supplier.

The problem is that current methods of in-house multi-carrier integration are complex and expensive, offer limited service monitoring and flexibility, and no end-to-end performance guarantees. This limits the improvements in business performance that IT promises.

"From my experience working with the members of the EVUA (Enterprise VPN Users Association), it is clear that most enterprises are still looking for a single supplier to deliver and manage a global network service covering their internal organisation and increasingly their extranet requirements to customers, suppliers and partners", says Phil Barton, CEO of EVUA Services. "Virtually all carriers have given up the 1990's dream of a ubiquitous global infrastructure and are partnering at various levels, resulting in uncertain service quality and an inability to monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across carrier interfaces. This is leaving the CIO's and telecoms managers with the dilemma of how they can deliver the seamless real-time access to applications and multimedia services required by their organisation in this multi-carrier environment."

The Nexagent System enables integrators to provide enterprises with the optimal multi-carrier IP network by accessing all carriers in all geographies connected together in a standardised way – the ‘Network Service Grid’. The Nexagent System’s key components are: shared Nexagent Peering Points, Carrier Independent Monitoring and Network Lifecycle Management Software, which automates critical steps in the design, implementation and ongoing service assurance of multi-carrier solutions. Nexagent uniquely enables proactive SLA (Service Level Agreement) management by independently real time monitoring the user’s experience of the network service and continuously comparing the result to the SLA offered by each carrier.

Nexagent licenses the use of the System to integrators, who act as prime contractors for the outsourced enterprise networks, and all carriers contract directly with the integrator.

City LifeLine (CLL) recognised the potential of what Nexagent was developing two years ago and was selected to become the first co-location facilities company to host the Nexagent Peering Points in Q3 2002. City Life Line Chairman, Colin Bertthelsen adds: “We at CLL believe that a multi-carrier model like Nexagent's enables the delivery of significantly improved virtual private IP WAN service at much lower cost to enterprises.” Peter Moss, technical director, says: "We are happy to be have been involved in live service testing which for the first time has shown how seamless multi-carrier IP SLA’s and Quality of Service can be achieved."

“By implementing principles from manufacturing supply chains into the vertically integrated telecoms market, Nexagent’s model optimises the whole value chain to create a win, win, win for the enterprise, integrator and carrier. CLL’s support for these live service tests demonstrates their ability to think ahead of the curve and innovate when it will benefit their customers.’’ Muirhead concludes, “Nexagent’s model delivers real benefits to all players by focusing on leveraging the strengths of each. Today most global enterprises purchase commodity layer 2 services from Telcos and build the IP network themselves. The Nexagent System enables carriers to move up the value chain and sell high margin, on-net, managed QoS based IP VPN services through an efficient sales channel, minimising sales costs and maximising profits”.