As a carrier and cloud-neutral consulting firm, John Alexander Consulting (JAC) works on behalf of its clients – with a specialty in global holding firms – to design, procure, and implement the right combination of carrier solutions suited to their unique technology environments. JAC has honed its expertise in highly acquisitive and divestive holding firms during its 15-plus years of business.
Alexis Pomierski, Executive Director at JAC explains, “Holding and private equity firms now require deeper transparency and segmentation of their business’s technology assets. We architect a solution that allows these firms to pool resources, simplify routing, and access economies of scale without losing application autonomy. We collaborate with the firm’s business leaders to architect pivotal technology solutions that fits their current and future environments.”
Navigating a Complex Tech Landscape
Parent entities that acquire or sell off parts of their business face unique technology-related challenges. Oftentimes, these business scenarios lend to a complicated landscape of IT solutions and technologies.
These technologies may work in siloes, lack security, don’t integrate or migrate well, and may not reach the level of compliance required by the acquiring firm. This can increase complexity and cost, decrease visibility, create room for error, and overall cause a massive headache for in-house technology teams.
Recently, JAC partnered with Zayo to simplify the tech stack and improve throughput for a low-latency holding firm with multiple global trading platforms. The holding firm had completed multiple acquisitions and hired JAC to optimize the IT environment because the acquired companies – and their technologies – were operating autonomously.
The Holding Firm’s Challenge
The main challenges the customer faced were:
- Routing inefficiencies due to multi-VDOM overlap, preventing the customer from accessing and sharing services among entities.
- Integration issues with the existing SASE platform.
A need for a unified security and edge platform across entities.
The Solution
Step one was to implement the Zayo edge routing solution. This solution solved the multi-VDOM overlap, secured the location with an edge firewall, and integrated with the SASE application they’d deployed.
Once step one was completed, with routing fixed and implemented, Zayo and JAC assessed and optimized the firm’s network.
Alexis reflects on the partnership with Zayo during the project, “I was so impressed with the project management group at Zayo. Every single call they came to the table with at least five technical resources.” When the teams faced technical challenges during implementation, “Instead of going back to the drawing board and doing pre and post-sales engineering, the team was able to work through the problem collectively and come up with a solution that worked for the client and their network.”
The result? The firm will save hundreds of thousands of dollars by accessing a single platform for shared resources, simpler and faster routing, and outsourcing their full supported security edge.
Partner with Zayo
Over the past few years, Zayo has recommitted to and invested in our partner program, ensuring we create a better experience for partners and end users.
In 2022, we established our first-ever partner advisory board meeting and implemented the feedback from the meeting directly into our plans, processes, and programs proving that we are putting our commitment to the channel into action.
These investments aren’t going unnoticed by our partners – including JAC.
“While JAC and Zayo have been partners for years, in the past two years, I’ve really seen an effort for the channel integration and knowledge program to increase,” Alexis shares, “They have some of their top producers on advisory boards, they’re sharing their strategies with us, they’re helping us with information to better prepare our client from a pivotal technology design perspective. Offering us more products and education only empowers the client and the agencies.”