Allen Timpany, CEO of the London, UK-based company, said the Vanco NetDirect brings to the world of buying WAN services the same kind of approach you can find on the web to acquiring many other products. It’s ironic that the industry that brought you the internet and price comparison sites doesn’t have the facility for its own business, he said.
Use of NetDirect is free, with Vanco expecting to make its money by buying wholesale, adding our mark-up and selling it on, said Timpany.
Vanco refers to itself as a virtual network operator, or VNO, in that it signs a contract for WAN connectivity with an enterprise, then contracts with asset-based carriers for the provision of the pipes, manages and monitors the service, and renegotiates and/or switches providers transparently to the end customer.
This is a relatively high-touch service, and NetDirect is much more of what Timpany called a low-service offering at very competitive prices. It is the result in part of internal development on the international side, together with the May 2005 acquisition of Universal Access Global Holdings Inc, which already had the database for US carriers, as well as the methodology for delivering the more wholesale type of service. It enabled us to bring together our global and their dense US coverage, Timpany said.
He added that two of Vanco’s closest partners, Swisscom AG and Bell Canada Inc, have been beta-testing NetDirect for the last six months and Swisscom has done $13m of business with it, extending its services outside Switzerland.
