Wholesale service provider Epsilon is expanding its presence in the United States to provide more connectivity options for its end customers through its SDN network, backbone and web portal.
Singapore-based Epsilon has 100 points of presence (POPs) worldwide with 25 of those located in the United States. Epsilon Chief Commercial Officer Carl Roberts said the goal was to double and then triple the number of POPs it has in the U.S. over the next 18-30 months.
Epsilon offers SD-WAN services through a partnership with Cato Networks, as well as connectivity services, SIP trunking and telephony services across Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
"The U.S. market is a major focus market for us," said Roberts in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We're building out our U.S. network and we're building our channel partner agreements. Our goal is to make the geography of the Americas our biggest segment worldwide. So, exciting times here at Epsilon."
To that end, Epsilon established its U.S. headquarters in Long Island, New York, last year in order to have direct access to multiple submarine cable systems that connect North American, Europe and Latin America while offering access to its colocation and interconnection services from that location.
Epsilon launched its Infiny by Epsilon on-demand connectivity platform and portal last year as the centerpiece of its on-demand connectivity services that are located on its software-defined networking fabric. The portal can be accessed via PCs, smartphones and tablets.
"The portal is kind of the delivery vehicle, so it's an on-demand connectivity service across the whole fabric of the ICP (integrated communications provider) ecosystem," Roberts said. "This year we had another release in March of the portal with an improved end-user interface, more functionality and some more analytics in the portal.
"This is a journey that we will continue to go down because it's never static when you have a portal delivering services. We have a full list of this ongoing development to make it richer and more valued to the customers who use it."
Roberts said Epsilon is interconnected with about 300 carriers around the world and as well as 300 communications services providers, internet exchanges, network service providers and internet exchange providers (IX.)
"We're connected to the major cloud players, so that's Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba," Roberts said. "We're also connected with Oracle and IBM. We're connected to about a dozen IXs around the world and that's going to grow to around 30 by the end of the year."
"What we sell across our SDN-enabled fabric is on-demand connectivity. So a lot of port-to-port, port-to-IX, port-to-data centers connections. Anywhere there's an Equinex interconnect we're there as well. We deliver all of this, apart from last mile services, on our backbone and Infiny portal," he added.
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Roberts said that one of Epsilon's biggest growing segments was end-to-end internet of things companies that need global capabilities. The CSP segment of the cloud is also growing "extremely fast," according to Roberts.
In order to keep pace with the demand for IoT, cloud and other connectivity services, Epsilon is upgrading its network with Juniper Networks' Metro Fabric solution on its Infiny by Epsilon platform.
"We're using Juniper technology to put 100 gig across our backbone," Roberts said. "We've done phase one with our first 90 sites connected."
Roberts said that Epsilon competes primarily against Megaport, IX Reach and PacketFabric.
"I would argue that what we have in our portfolio is more extensive and covers more geographic areas of the world," he said. "But it's such a huge space that there's plenty of room for everybody to play and have a good day at work."
Roberts said Epsilon was very active in developing the APIs that work across its portal and with interconnecting with other service providers. Earlier this year, Epsilon teamed up with China's DCConnect on two-way, intercarrier network orchestration across each other's networks using an API that Epsilon developed.