Joe Zhu, Zenlayer Founder and CEO, discusses key technologies that are shaping the telecom industry ahead of ITW (International Telecoms Week).

To meet Zenlayer at ITW, please contact us at info@zenlayer.com

What technologies do you see shaping the industry and how?

As IoT becomes more ubiquitous, interactions among end users/devices will explode, thus increasing the need to minimize latency. To achieve minimum latency, proximity is key. Therefore, telecoms should embrace edge computing and build platforms to allow users to rapidly deploy edge computing capabilities.

Also, blockchain has the potential to increase efficiencies and generate new revenue streams for the telecom industry. Blockchain’s inherent distributed properties may give rise to the decentralization of networks, allowing for the development of self-managed, peer-to-peer networks, real time price adjustments based on local supply and demand, and new ways to utilize idle capacities for non-critical traffic.

Finally, 5G will be the underlying technology that will truly allow IoT to proliferate. With the announcement of 5G NR in December, telecoms will need to rapidly upgrade their network equipment and develop new software and broadcasting policies to fully support this standard.

How important is SDN for the industry and what is your company doing to implement and deploy this technology capability?

SDN is vital for the industry as the demand for capacity skyrockets with 5G and IoT. A software defined service can use resources much more efficiently and respond quickly to changes in demand.

Zenlayer has implemented software defined capability into all of our new products and services, including software defined bare metal servers and SD-WAN that allows for not only point-to-point connections between physical locations (data centers, offices), but also direct connectivity between various public clouds such as AWS, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.

What are new developments and initiatives that are exciting for your company in 2018?

In addition to upgrades and expansions of our existing products and services, we will be launching our global edge computing platform this year. Our platform will allow companies to instantly deploy edge computing capability around the world, including countries that are traditionally difficult to enter, such as China, Brazil, Russia, India, etc.

In particular, SMEs who do not have the capital to invest heavily in infrastructure will be able to quickly reduce latency and improve their users’ experience by deploying their applications and services on our platform. In addition, to give companies the flexibility to respond to changes in demand, our platform is elastic and pay-as-you-go.

To meet Zenlayer at ITW, please contact us at info@zenlayer.com