Greg Butler recently joined EXA Infrastructure as The Head of the Americas, VP of Sales. Telecom Review recently spoke with Greg about their expanded sales presence.
The following are excerpts from our conversation that will give our readers a good insight into EXA’s expansion.
When we asked Greg to let us know what brought him to EXA he told us, “I saw a huge opportunity to offer the geographic breadth and depth of EXA’s European long-haul network footprint to US-based global companies, particularly given EXA’s transatlantic infrastructure that includes the lowest latency link between Europe and North America. EXA’s network is the best there is in Europe, and the fastest-growing, with 114,000 route kilometers across 34 countries. I really believe in the company’s mission and ambition, but also its strong leadership that has zero distractions around what we want to achieve.”
He also noted that there are fewer strong diverse route options with carriers in the US today.
When asked about EXA’s market in North America today Greg told us “Our growth ambition is two-fold. Firstly, the ability to serve North American-based companies in providing diverse and resilient digital infrastructure across the European routes they need access to, and inter-regional connections on to Africa, the Middle East and Asia. We want to become the undisputed leader in the pan-European and trans-Atlantic DC-to-DC connectivity business. Secondly, all of the above, plus the ability to provide connectivity into North American networks and for traffic to and from our transatlantic infrastructure. All of that is attractive both to hyperscalers and to all organizations moving ever-greater volumes of data to the cloud.”
EXA Express is the premier high-speed cable to the US from Europe so we asked Greg, where do you see the high-speed, low-latency marketplace for the USA?
“We talk a lot about EXA being ‘where growth happens’. The ability to offer the fastest connection speeds between New York and London, and onwards to the major financial cities of north Europe, has long been attractive to the financial sector and we’re already the market leader for supporting high-frequency traders. We see substantial growth potential in providing public cloud provider on-ramps for traders, and EXA is continually augmenting our network to serve these customers. But today there is increasing demand from multiple sectors, as businesses move their applications to the cloud and more corporate workloads require data center-to-data center connectivity. It’s not just the more conventional sectors either: sectors like gaming, cryptocurrency and broadcast content are wanting extremely low latency connectivity across the Atlantic.
“We will always look at business cases for expanding our capabilities through infrastructure that gives access to major cities and business locations that our clients need to connect to. For example, that may be ultra-low-latency connections to new buildings - because we own the fastest route from NY to London, any time we create a low-latency connection to a new building or market at one of those locations, we’ve essentially extended our ULL offering. This is happening every month, and we are continuing to make EXA Express more interconnected and more valuable to our customers. Another example is our ability to expand our network and connect into private data centers, particularly in hotspots across the US.”
When asked if he see US West Coast connectivity as a large market for EXA Greg noted, we are going to remain very focused on our core business as predominantly a European and transatlantic infrastructure provider, with a large North American customer base. But where we have specific customer needs, we will always consider how we might partner or otherwise create new capabilities to serve their needs. Many of our customers are global businesses with a large presence across Europe that may be based on the US west coast but have large data centers around the east coast. Our very straightforward product set is an advantage here: other providers are distracted going up the stack, we are specialists.”
Data Center connectivity is a hot market and EXA is very focused on this market. Greg told us that their very focused product set allows them to serve the data center providers in ways that other carriers can’t - they are a pure infrastructure specialist. EXA is focused, with a clear ambition to be the leading DC-to-DC provider. To do that we’ve designed a network and products that best serve our customers. We’re adding something to our network every month.”
Greg concluded by telling us that for North American customers, EXA offers a gateway to Europe – and there is a huge need for that. “A lot of US infrastructure providers do not have anything like that connectivity into Europe. We are not planning significant expansion of our current North American footprint but will always look at how best to serve customers by providing the right infrastructure where they need it to be. Our growth plans in North America are on a customer level - where growth happens, we're open to partnering and listening.”