During the 16th Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Cristina Crucini, Marketing Director, EXA Infrastructure, shared the company’s outlook for 2023, trends that will impact their commercial growth and development and their plans on how to remain a market leader.
Notably, EXA Infrastructure was recognized by Telecom Review for its global excellence, receiving the “Best Global Fiber Infrastructure Deployment” award
Can you give us the company milestones for 2022? What are the new and exciting projects planned for EXA Infrastructure in 2023 and beyond?
EXA’s milestones for 2022 were simple yet ambitious: build brand awareness and reputation for our network capabilities [and strengthen] customer focus and growth strategy after the carveout from GTT. Thanks to the expanded and experienced leadership team that has joined EXA, our ambitions for 2023 are even more solid.
2023 will be a year of consolidation for EXA, based on the great results we had in 2022. We managed to reinforce our reputation in the market for the quality of our infrastructure, with a focus on our customers and our people. For us, the better way to serve our customers is to remain focused on what we do and what we excel at. At the same time, we are heavily investing in our people to make sure we attract and retain the best talents in our industry who can deliver even more value to our customers.
EXA is becoming a leading player in attracting and retaining talent. We recently launched the EXA Talent Program and the EXA Sales Academy, for example, involving internal and external coaches and trainers to deliver leading courses and insight sessions. Our Women of EXA program is another exciting initiative we launched in 2022 focusing on why a culture of inclusion is critical for us and how we start to take steps to create it.
And finally, as this is our mission and our vision launched in 2022, we reconfirm our statement of becoming the undisputed leader in providing data center-to-data center connectivity services in Europe and North America.
From your perspective, how will EXA Infrastructure maintain its reputation for fueling opportunities for clients and providing them with access to new markets?
Our solid financial backing combined with over 20 years of experience in building critical infrastructure assets sets a quite high bar for competition, especially if combined with the commitment to deliver on time and incredible flexibility to fulfill customers’ needs.
We expect more investments in some strategic areas, especially in the South and East of Europe, as we see the customers needing our presence. We are reaching out to the borders of Europe to be able to capture traffic as soon as it gets to the continent because, from a connectivity perspective, EXA is Europe for those organizations needing to go through our continent and then be connected to the rest of the world.
Some examples from 2022 include the strategic JV with TAP, which, through a new state-of-the-art, high-capacity fiber optic route, will add a direct link from Marseille to Istanbul to EXA’s owned network infrastructure, with branches connecting to Athens, Sofia and Tirana. We also built new landing stations in the South of Italy, in Puglia and Sicily where a growing number of subsea cable systems are landing after entering the Mediterranean Sea. The brand-new network expansion in Portugal, with a north and a south route to add diversification, also connects back to our backbone in Spain.
With today’s increased connectivity demand, what are EXA customers’ requirements, and how do you integrate these into promoting your services?
Customers want services that are bigger, faster and better. This means they are expecting more from their trusted providers. We believe that the best way we can try to serve our customers is by remaining focused on the services that we provide and trying to be excellent at all of those services. We are quite different in this with the rest of the market because we only focus on a very small number of services, but we want to be the best in the market in providing those services.
In the end, what customers really expect is for you to take away the complexity for them. The best approach is to be predictable. And we say that the more invisible you are to your customers, the better you are at providing your service because it means you are stable and reliable in delivering on your commitment. Basically, you are making their lives easier while enabling them to reach their objectives. That’s how we expect to continue to leverage our role for the growth of our customers.
As a trusted infrastructure provider, which do you think are the trends that will impact EXA Infrastructure’s commercial growth and development?
Talking about the trends impacting EXA, I think we will be impacted by the trends that will impact everyone else in our market. Definitely, the challenge is to remain relevant in this industry. And we see that the best way to remain relevant is actually to change the way we collaborate with other telco providers and other players in our industry. There is a need for more different types of collaboration in the ecosystem to enable the future growth of digital platforms.
Secondly, there is a shared mindset that our industry is aging and that there is a talent shortage. Being active and making the most of the people we have while attracting and developing the next generation of talent for the international carrier industry is definitely something EXA is committed to.
Thirdly, in a market that is increasingly consolidating, we want to make sure that we remain focused and continue to deliver. We want to expand our service portfolio, and we will remain attached to our infrastructure to provide the best services for our customers. We strive to be the reliable, accessible and trustworthy partner they need.
EXA Infrastructure has been nominated for the Telecom Review Excellence Awards. What does this recognition mean to you?
It's a great recognition, and we are very pleased to be nominated. This is a testimony to the great work we did in launching our brand and reassuring customers about the quality of our infrastructure and also the expertise of our people. We have a team now that has over twenty years of experience in building critical infrastructure services and being close to our customers with a can-do attitude that makes a difference. This nomination is a recognition of the work we have done in our market.