Nitel goes global with international network-as-a-service plans

Nitel’s newest service offering takes the company’s existing network-as-a-service out of North America and into the international market, as the company announces the availability of its SASE capabilities and NaaS to 34 global regions.

Nitel’s key offering is a full as-a-service network, leveraging relationships with data carriers — wired or wireless — at the local level to deliver basic connectivity, and then fold that into a robust enterprise networking suite, complete with SASE and private networking. The idea is to provide a more or less out-of-the-box network product that allows small and medium-size companies to hand the vast majority of their connectivity issues off to Nitel, which manages configuration and provisioning. In addition, Nitel provides SASE-standard security features like antimalware sandboxing, zero trust network access, data loss prevention and content filtering.

The pitch, in short, is less work and more functionality, with added security as a bonus, according to Mike Frane, Nitel’s chief product officer.

“That’s one of the problems in the industry that SASE attempts to address,” said Frane. “There’s so much sprawl today that network teams have to work on with different tools and applications, and a lot of the vulnerabilities today happen where there isn’t uniformity over all these different settings and rule sets.”

Nitel said that it’s working directly with local ISPs around the world — nearly 100 of them at launch, according to Frane. Rather than contracting with large aggregators, this direct approach allows the company to offer lower rates and fuller support.

A key part of the opening of Nitel’s services to the world at large is a partnership with VMware, according to the company. VMware’s global footprint of cloud infrastructure makes for much shorter network round trips, and Nitel boasts that 80% of the world’s population will be less than 10 milliseconds away from its network as a result.

This type of NaaS offering is available elsewhere, according to Lisa Pierce, managing vice president of enterprise network systems and services at Gartner Research. However, most companies in the space are major carriers like Verizon or AT&T, whereas Nitel’s more agnostic approach to carriers allows it to focus on the underlying services.

 “One of the issues about trying to go down this road is the amount of modernization that these technologies and the tools that manage them require,” Pierce said. “Because Nitel isn’t spending nearly as much of a revenue dollar on dealing directly with the end user as, say, Verizon does, it can funnel more of that into tools and processes.”

Nitel’s international service is available now, and is priced based on the type of security features, overall throughput and services required by an individual company, according to Frane. The company has already run a private alpha test with some customers.