Ekinops is a French company serving the world with a product portfolio that consists of two highly complementary product sets. One, marketed under the EKINOPS 360 brand name, provides a single, fully integrated platform for Metro, Regional, and Long-Haul applications up to 400G. The other, marketed under the OneAccess brand name, provides a wide choice of physical and virtualized deployment options for enterprise services requiring layer 2 and layer 3 network functions.
Telecom Review spoke to Sylvain Quartier, vice president of marketing and products strategy and Jason Beaumont, vice president of APAC region to know more about Ekinops participation at CommunicAsia 2019.
Sylvain Quartier said that the company is showcasing both product sets at the show. “We have an opportunity on both sides where customers need to continue to invest in transport especially with 5G that brings opportunity and transforms the way you consider transport notably with the slicing of transport network dedicated to services. Another big trend is around SD-WAN where you want to leverage any network capacity you want for enterprises to serve application performance and bring some autonomy to enterprises to have interconnection and communication,” he said.
On the role of Ekinops in the Asia Pacific region, Jeason Beaumont highlighted the diversity that exists in the region. He also emphasized that the company is now focusing on expanding its footprint across the whole APAC region.
“APAC is an interesting region for us because it’s very diverse. We have a strong incumbency in Australia and a footprint across all the telcos there. Recently, we’ve focused on developing the market in South East Asia. We’ve had business in Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore before but it’s always been mostly on the access side. Our mission going forward is to develop the market and broaden our footprint. We still focus on the service providers as our key area but across both portfolios,” he explained.
As to the challenges brought about by this region, Beaumont confirmed that it’s the size of the area that the region covers, but stressed that technology can always be the solution of overcome any challenge.
“The size of the region and the different cultures here are major challenges. However, technology speaks to all different cultures and that’s why we found good value in bringing technology forward. We have something that suits every market, whether developed or emerging. The culture is different but challenges are similar.”
Ekinops is definitely looking to address the needs of the future, especially with the advent of new technologies such as 5G and IoT. According to Quartier, the future of networks is more and more service oriented. With IoT, connected cars, digital point of sales, etc. such use cases can be allied from an edge perspective and a transport perspective.
“With 5G, we’re about to allocate transport networks to special services. We believe that we can offer interesting solutions in the future to serve to telcos an end-to-end service possibility and not just network and technologies,” he said.
“I think that this business can bring openness, robustness and easiness. It is what we’re constantly looking for: to be open to an ecosystem, to be robust because solutions are more in real time and complex and to offer easiness because technologies such as virtualization can be complex sometimes. Those three elements are what we’re aiming for,” Quartier concludes.