Comms Business Magazine talks to Wayne Churchill, COO at network services company MDNX about its infrastructure as a Service channel offering.
Along with CEO Mark Thompson, Wayne Churchill joined Solution1 in 2009 in an effort to stabilise the former Siemens’ network services company. The pair decided to form a new company, MDNX and look for potential companies to acquire. Wayne Churchill. “We looked at more than 100 companies in order to find the mix we wanted. MDNX bought out Solution 1 as it had a great customer base including many blue-chip companies. We then purchased the UK retail division of Viatel. This gave us a core fibre network and several data centres in London that had co-location and hosted services customers. This fitted our long-term strategy of carrier integration. Viatel also brought technical excellence in to MDNX. Finally we bought CI-Net who had some key capabilities such as managing cloud computing infrastructure and managed wireless services.
“The three acquisitions were completed in October 2010 and integration began immediately. We worked to tight deadlines and completed the task when all staff moved to our current Bracknell offices in December of the same year. It was an enormous task – we had three of everything which meant a lot of consolidation including the closing of four out of the five buildings we had.”
Churchill says that today MDNX is a 40% channel business and that the remainder of the sales are direct to large blue-chip companies. ”We provide managed network services and cloud infrastructure in place in the UK and it’s very competitive. We are connecting and integrating on to our own fibre network all the major carriers at Layer 2 or 3. One immediate benefit here is that we pick up carriers ‘on-net’ which means no blackmail from our co-locators and reduced costs”.
MDNX currently has some 180 staff, 60% of whom according to Churchill are technically qualified personnel with Cisco Microsoft or Juniper accreditations. ”This means we can get more things done and we get them done quickly – for our users and our channel partners.
Embedded in the business are the former Viatel data centres holding co-location and hosted service provider customer. Overall and taken together this means that MDNX has a cloud-ready infrastructure now and our next steps are to make this available for the channel to either sell on and/or provide their own value-added services over.
“Uniquely MDNX can provide a complete package that includes connectivity such as DSL Ethernet and MPLS from carriers and users can provision their own processors, memory storage and applications to sit on top.”
Churchill sees live online back up as a key application along with web services and ‘dozens of other opportunities.
“Key to success we feel for channel partners is having the right supplier, one that can provide scalable solutions.
“Our existing cloud-based service include connectivity, co-location and hosting in our data centres. Today we are enhancing those services with a range of cloud products that we can offer with the carriers we have integrated our network with. These include Talk Talk Business, BE, Global Crossing, NEOS, BT and Virgin Media. Channel partners will also be able to sell on and add their own value to cloud processing, memory and storage.”
