Dutch IaaS Provider Is Primed for Cloud-Scale Growth

Interconnect was founded by brothers Rob and Jeroen Stevens, who still serve as the CEO and CTO today. As a regional provider, Interconnect is known for its attentive customer service and deep technical expertise. Customers range from local ad agencies and hospitals to O’Neill, the U.S. surfboard brand, and Vodafone, a multinational telecommunications company.

Interconnect continuously invests in infrastructure to meet the ever-growing needs of businesses. This means scaling its infrastructure services performance and capabilities while delivering the highest levels of availability to meet its 99.9 percent uptime guarantee to customers. It offers a full suite of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and private cloud services. The company operates data centers in Den Bosch and Eindhoven, connected by a fiber ring, and works with other service providers to provide customers with their choice of connectivity.

Interconnect recently upgraded its core network to deliver cloud-scale capacity and scale by adding Juniper solutions. “We implemented an IP fabric to increase scale and gain flexibility in our customer solutions,” says Dave Thoonsen, network engineer at Interconnect.

With standard data center building blocks, Interconnect can leverage automation more easily to streamline configuration management. Network automation has led to a significant drop in OpEx and reduced the time-to-market for new services and to onboard new customers.

The time savings is dramatic. “We might spend 100 minutes configuring switches or routers in the traditional, manual way,” he says. “Now, our goal is to automate the standard configurations which are the building blocks of the services that we offer, decreasing our time to provision a customer to just a couple of minutes.”

Automation also improves service availability. “When operators work traditionally, jumping from switch to switch to make configuration changes by hand, there’s a lot of room for error which can impact network availability,” he says.

Ultimately, automation results in higher customer satisfaction. “We’re developing a customer portal where a customer will be able to request services, set up the network connection, and be running in a couple of minutes,” says Thoonsen.

“We are proud to be a Juniper customer,” says Thoonsen. “Juniper is very good in terms of functionality, stability, and performance, as well as excellent support.”