MAX Gigapop: “Federal & Corporate Recruitment Strategies”

1. MAX Gigapop: “Federal & Corporate Recruitment Strategies” Dan Magorian Director of Engineering & Operations Presentation to Internet2 Gigapop Coordination Group May 3, 2005

2. Now at 38 participants, doubled network size in 2-3 years Just added Holocaust Museum, World Bank, and Library of Congress in last 6 weeks, Near-Terms that will be online by summer: Health & Human Services / U.S. Food & Drug Administration USDA, Agricultural Research Center / Beltsville Johns Hopkins APL and DC campuses Montgomery College COLA, nonprofit genetics research corporation Army Lab for Telecom Science Max will likely be at 50 connectors by 2006 Forecast is for continued growth!! MAX is experiencing high growth in our production network

3. Mid-Atlantic Crossroads DREN Abilene vBNS ESNet DRAGON NREN BoSSNET NISN ISP MAX Regional Infrastructure National/International Peering Networks Regional Network Participants NGIX-East ATDnet Univ System Md Network Virginia Institutional Connectors

4. Strategy vs location and just plain luck • I wish I could say this growth was the result of a comprehensive long-term marketing strategy being carried out, but I would be lying. • Guy Almes, 2000: “Dan, you’re sitting on a goldmine in Washington. I’d have no sympathy if you can’t figure out how to work it” • Well, we panned for several years and saw only modest growth, averaging 4-8 new folks/year. • We quickly had most of the major universities in the region, • And early/strong support from big Federal agencies (NASA/GSFC, NIH/NLM, NOAA) that “got the Internet2 picture”. • But in the last 2 years, word of the success of Internet2 and Max has gotten around, bringing lots of new folks to our door. • “The value of the network increases with the number connected” seems to have led to snowballing membership.

5. Still, I’d like to think we’ve done some things right • We built a regional optical WDM OC48 network with 5 distributed pop locations in 2000-2001 when a lot of folks had OC3s to a single “gigapoint”. This gave us an advanced network with a lot of headroom. • We had to take out a loan and incur risk to build it, which cost us some pretty lean years paying it back before we had a lot of participants. In those years, cost cutting was essential and “buying used” kept the budget balanced. • Since tight budgets plus university bureaucracy kept us ridiculously understaffed at “a very small number of really good people”, we became adept at being extremely flexible, since everyone had to wear many hats and cover 3-4 people’s worth of work. • We have a funded research side (Jerry’s) as well as a production network side (Dan’s), playing a very important role in establishing R&E credentials as well as tangible benefits to research partners in region.

6. “That’s all Techie history. How about some strategies for gigapop Admin folks?” • Yes, we do have some strategies. One of the most useful has been strong Carrier Marketing Partnerships. Since MAX has never had a Director of Marketing, we’ve relied on good partnerships with newer aggressive carriers, who have every incentive to wear out their shoe leather selling circuits and dark fiber to connect people to MAX. These include Fibergate, Starpower/RCN, Yipes, and Allied Telecom. This was a major change from 1998 when we thought a blanket purchase agreement with Verizon for customer atm circuits was the way to go (which never happened). These carriers have brought many customers to MAX, esp Fed agencies. • Strong Major Carrier Relationships with Qwest and now also Level3 for fiber for MAX optical rings, colo at their facilities, and low-cost ISP resale have also been crucial to MAX’s growth. Qwest has been quite flexible in adapting service offerings to MAX’s needs.

7. “Different Strokes for Different Folks” • With high growth in Federal agencies and Military participants (ATDnet, Naval Research Lab, DREN in NGIX, and soon Army LTS), we have had to become sensitive to their processes and needs, which can differ considerably from Internet2’s style. • The joke is, “It can take some agencies a year to think about joining, another year to get connected, and a third to start paying you. Luckily it’s too much trouble for them to stop.” Long lead times take a lot of work from both MAX and carrier partners. • A lot of credit goes to Tony Conto, Exec Dir for dogged persistence in sheparding contracts through, especially when so many procurement agents feel the need to rewrite our standard Federal contracts, and university lawyers require sovereign indemnification and may not understand Service Provider business needs.

8. What’s Ahead? • So now that we’re in better times, we’re slowly staffing up with positions long needed, like a Business Mgr and a Director of Membership and/or Business Development. They will need to think “out of the box” about future service offerings. • “Listen to what people tell you they need”. Sounds obvious, but often hard to do institutionally. Max just had a very successful one-day members meeting, got a lot of feedback that will get incorporated in where we go from here. • “Anticipate what people are going to need”. Your customers are going to want you to transparently handle potential Abilene carrier changes and NLR connectivity and fanout to new pops for them. • “The world is changing under our feet”. Things like service pricing may need to be radically revised as technologies like dynamic optical switching change the world of networking as we know it.

9. Thanks! mailto://magorian@maxgigapop.net http://www.maxgigapop.net/network