Guest: Allen Proithis (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: GXC (LinkedIn, Twitter)

In this interview, GXC CEO Allen Proithis talks about the importance of private cellular networks and how GXC is enabling enterprises to benefit from it with greater ease.

Allen Proithis, the new CEO of GXC, is a networking veteran who has served as the founding president of SIGFOX North America, and has worked for InterDigital and HP. He has not only witnessed but also been a part of the transformation networking industry, especially the mobile ecosystem, has gone through over decades.

Like many, he believes that Apple’s iPhone started a world-transforming revolution, akin to the invention of the wheel, steam engine, or electricity. The iPhone not only started the whole mobile revolution, but also dramatically changed the way we create and consume data. “If we go back a few decades, data traffic was about 10% of everything in traditional telecom networks. Today, it’s pretty much almost all of it,” said Proithis.

There was a time when companies used to think of data in terms of how many blade servers they could fit into their basement. Today, most players don’t even own a server. Almost all their workloads run in the cloud and almost all their data is stored away from them in some cloud.

Public cloud has given people more choices about finding a balance between how and where to keep their data and run their workloads. In a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, people are leveraging the elasticity of the public cloud while also benefiting from the control that comes with private cloud and data centers.

Due to this changed dynamics, connectivity or networks have become ‘highways’ of the modern economy. Enterprises need the right network to reach their applications and data residing in the cloud. At the same time, they also need an even more efficient internal network.

“The fact is that most cellular coverage is traditionally outside on a public network, and most wireless data consumption is inside enterprises on a private network,” said Proithis.

Many organizations rely on the traditional ethernet layer and wifi environment for internal connectivity, but they are not designed to handle the demand and challenges of many business-critical applications. They have their own limits. That’s where private cellular networks come into play.

Private cellular networks are essential for any business entity that has massive internal data consumption needs. It could be a warehouse, manufacturing facility, or a transportation hub. Traditional ethernet and wifi are just not efficient in such use cases. These organizations need reliability, security, low latency of ‘cellular’ but in a private manner.

To help enterprises leverage private cellular networks, GXC offers a fully integrated turnkey solution. It enables enterprises to respond faster, in a try cloud-native fashion and spin a mesh node in matter of minutes, not hours or days.

GXC solutions are also designed to be flexible enough to meet where customers are in their infrastructure and environment journey. Proithis points out that “We are built from the ground up as enterprise-ready integration with the architecture of APIs. It’s very easy to integrate on any control or database system that people already have in place. It doesn’t matter what management system they use, getting data in the right place is what we have architected out of the box. We try to make it as easy as possible so that the focus is on getting value out of it instead of on the tech.”