Pulsant Takes Steps to Become the UK’s Platform for Connecting Business
Partnership with Megaport helps Pulsant and its customers realize their potential.
Pulsant is a digital edge infrastructure company that provides cloud, colocation, and connectivity services to UK businesses. Supported by a network of 12 strategically located edge data centers, its platform puts 95% of the UK’s population within reach of businesses seeking to deploy new edge applications, or securely extend hybrid infrastructure to improve performance.
Headquartered in Maidenhead, UK, Pulsant has a rich colocation heritage stretching back almost a quarter of a century. Since the company’s beginnings as EdNET, an ISP, in 1995, Pulsant has grown tremendously through acquisition, as well as organically, to become one of the UK’s leading hybrid cloud companies today. The company focuses on delivering secure, compliant, and optimized solutions to its customers. Its unique value proposition is its ability to provide data sovereignty to customers through a high-bandwidth, low-latency network.
“Our aim is to be the UK’s platform for connecting businesses. As we layer on cloud services, managed services, and connections to public cloud on-ramps, we become an even more key platform. We are also adapting to where we are seeing the market shifting, such as the requirement for IoT and smart devices in towns and cities where there will be a need for low latency connectivity and increase in the amount of data created at these endpoints,” said Mike Hoy, Technology Director at Pulsant.
**To cloud or not to cloud
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Prior to its relationship with Megaport, Pulsant often found itself creating a bespoke mix of back-to-back connections to stand up networks and meet client needs. Without standardization, each implementation increased costs and complexity.
“I would describe the situation before as messy,” Hoy said. “We’ve always had a strong network offering, but it wasn’t consistent. There was no standard blueprint; we worked with multiple providers to deliver an [Azure] ExpressRoute or used another company’s on-ramp. Every implementation was unique and therefore not efficient.”
After having a “to cloud or not to cloud” discussion, Pulsant made a conscious decision to focus on a hybrid cloud offering rather than see public cloud as a direct competitor, and partner with the options already available. After an initial introduction, Pulsant realized that Megaport had all the right ingredients to be an ideal partner to help companies connect to public cloud services.
Making connectivity easy
In 2020, the two companies announced that through Pulsant’s Cloud Connect service, customers would be able to connect to more than 360 service providers on Megaport’s scalable private network. Leveraging Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN), Pulsant customers could also connect their infrastructure directly to Megaport points of presence housed within Pulsant data centers throughout the UK to access its hybrid & multicloud ecosystem.
Building on this success, the partnership between Pulsant and Megaport has deepened in the last twelve months, with Pulsant recently becoming a member of Megaport’s partner program.
“The conversation we have with customers has changed dramatically,” said Hoy. “We now have the confidence to say, ‘yes, we can help’ in any situation because we have the technical and sales enablement in place, as well as all the other benefits that come from being a part of the Megaport partner program.”
Service descriptions for easy cloud connectivity are now defined and documented, so the sales force has a view of what’s available across Pulsant’s sites. The company has now enabled Megaport capabilities across all its data centers. Pulsant and Megaport have begun to pitch unified solutions to customers, particularly those needing a seamless solution for network access in the UK and other global locations.
“Before, we had too many things that had to be lined up perfectly in order for customers to buy. Now we have been able to productize the Megaport offering with cloud on-ramps and international data centers, deploy that across all our sites, and publish that to our sales teams. We are in a much better place to enable what customers want,” said Hoy.
Building on wins
Today, only a few months after Pulsant officially joined Megaport’s partner program, dozens of Pulsant’s customers have chosen to use Megaport to connect to the cloud. Customers include companies in the payments and Independent Software Vendor industry. Euro Car Parts, for example, has started using Megaport and has seen the benefits with their colocation and managed services running well.
With strong service offerings, a healthy pipeline, and confidence in what they can deliver, Pulsant is poised to continue to grow this partnership and better serve its customers.
“I think one of the key changes here is where we have legacy customers that previously had a mixed solution, we’ve gone back and revisited them with an improved, seamless offering in which they have more confidence,” said Hoy.
Moving forward, Pulsant is exploring Megaport Virtual Edge to enable SD-WAN integration with its network as part of its ongoing commitment to innovation.
