Sell a platform, not just a circuit.
Your network still sells the way it did ten years ago: a quote, a contract and a wait for every order. The workloads it carries now arrive on demand, increasingly from a system rather than a person, and a sales cycle cannot answer them.
Network-as-a-Service turns the network into a platform business: access ports, interconnection and cloud on-ramps sold through a portal and an API, provisioned automatically, assured and billed from one catalogue, on infrastructure you already own.
PTX has extensive experience in building Network-as-a-Service platforms, and currently runs them in multi-year contracts. You own the network, the customers and the IP. We advise on the build model, develop and productise the platform and help run it until your internal team takes it on.
Inherited weeks from failure, rebuilt end to end. We onboarded an existing platform and stabilised it within weeks. Then we rebuilt every layer: infrastructure as code, a new SDN controller across multiple switch vendors, multiple partners re-integrated, and the application rewritten on the current open standard for interconnection APIs.
Live, and run. The rebuilt platform is live and we run it alongside the operator’s own team: monitoring, incidents and releases to an agreed service level, the roadmap reset yearly and reprioritised each quarter with its executive team, and the pricing, positioning and collateral its sales team needs to sell it.
Your customers expect to buy your network the way they buy cloud.
Buyers want to order connectivity in minutes, through a portal or an API, and scale it without a sales cycle. Most operators still quote by hand and provision over weeks. The gap between how customers want to buy and how operators still sell is where the growth is leaking away.
The operators who productise first take the recurring revenue, and the customer relationship, before the rest catch up. This is a window, not a permanent state. Manual delivery scales at the rate you hire. A platform scales at the rate customers buy.
Three ways a NaaS platform grows the business.
Where the growth comes from
Any service, any time, from one platform. Today each of these is a project that takes weeks and ties up people who could be building something bigger:
- a new service
- a bandwidth change
- a private cloud connection
- a firewall change
A NaaS platform turns each into a product in a catalogue rather than a project on a backlog. Start with connectivity, then add security and NFV, each live the moment a customer orders it and each a new recurring line on infrastructure you have already paid for. The API makes this work: a customer’s system requests a product, your platform provisions it, and no project gets opened. The catalogue grows as fast as you can define a product, not as slowly as you can staff one.
Customers find you and buy, without you selling to them. That is the demand the old model never sees. A sales process costs the same whether the deal is large or small, so a whole market gets gated out:
- the buyer who wants to click and provision
- the partner who would rather call an API than wait for a salesperson
- the smaller customer who wants a single service
- the system that orders connectivity on its own, with no person in the loop
They never enter your sales pipeline, so you never meet them. A platform reaches all of them: customers find your products in a marketplace, buy in minutes and provision without a conversation. Federate with other platforms and their customers can buy across to yours too. You are not selling harder; you are letting demand that was always there find a way in.
Sold the old way, the cost to serve rises in step with revenue, because every order needs people, so the margin barely moves. A platform breaks that link. The work goes in once, into the product and the automation behind it. After that, the hundredth order costs about the same to process as the tenth, whether they click through a portal or call your API.
The gap between revenue and the cost to serve is margin, and it is yours to keep.
Equinix Fabric and Colt’s On Demand platform already interconnect over standard MEF APIs, so a customer on one provisions across to the other in real time. Built to the same standards, your platform is a node in that ecosystem: your customers reach destinations you do not own, their customers reach yours, and you own your piece of the reach instead of reselling someone else’s.
Composed from product blocks we deliver independently.
A productised network: access ports, interconnection and cloud on-ramps sold through a portal and an API, with automated OSS and BSS handling provisioning, assurance and billing underneath, integrated with the inventory, billing and ticketing systems you already run. Take the whole platform, or only the blocks you are missing.
Automated OSS / BSS
The automation that provisions, assures and bills connectivity sold on demand.
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Network Infrastructure
The network the platform sells on, built to be automated and provisioned against.
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Cloud Platforms
The compute foundation the platform itself runs on.
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Portals, APIs & Marketplaces
The portal your customers order through, and the API they integrate against.
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Custom
Anything specific to your network that the standard blocks do not cover.
View productProduct that defines. Engineering that ships. Enablement that earns. Management that scales.
A platform this size stalls for predictable reasons: internal teams rarely have spare capacity at the same time, or agree on direction and priority, and third parties often lack the domain knowledge to get it live. We bring the product, platform and network specialists for as long as the work needs them, so you do not build a department to get a platform.
The people who shape your model built NaaS platforms at Console Connect and Digital Realty, from the operator’s side of the table. When we think a decision is wrong we say so, and why. The call is always yours. Meet the team
Everything we build ships with monitoring, tests and documentation, and the source sits in your repositories from day one. One of the platforms we took over had none of those. It has them now, and the operator owns them.
The platform sells in production under our management, with orders, provisioning and incidents worked on a shared alerting channel with the operator’s own team. Run covers the product strategy as well as the platform: we define the roadmap with your executive team and deliver it, release by release.
Built for you, or the right platform integrated. The choice is yours, not ours.
The fastest path is not always a bespoke build, and not always an existing platform. Because we both build from the ground up and integrate proven platforms, our recommendation is not tied to selling you either one. The right answer depends on what matters most to you: time to market, budget, and how much you want to own outright.
Build bespoke when owning the IP is worth the time it takes to develop. Integrate an existing platform when speed or cost matters more. We lay out the options that fit and deliver whichever you choose, and either way, you own the asset and the customer relationship.
Advise, build and run. Take all three, or only what you need.
All three engagement models are delivered through the PTX Innovation Lifecycle, our method for taking a platform from idea to revenue.
We advise. You build.
The strategy, the product and the commercial case, so your team builds the right thing.
We build and deliver.
The platform, built to production, integrated and ready for your customers.
We run it.
Operated in production to an agreed service level, for as long as you want us there.
You own the IP we build together. Run is offered, not required: we operate the platform for you, or hand it to your own team. Your leverage grows as you own and extend the asset, instead of compounding inside a platform you rent. Advise, build and run is a choice, not a dependency.
From network operator to platform operator.
Tell us where the growth is. We will map your path to a Network-as-a-Service platform, and what it takes to build and launch it, together.
