XON has scooped Juniper Networks’ top award for South African partners for the second year running at the recent award ceremony in Dubai.
XON is a value-added reseller of the Juniper Networks telecommunications and networking infrastructure throughout Africa and has consulted to and supplied organisations such as SEACOM, Telecom Namibia, the Dante network, several mobile and fixed line network service providers, enterprises and government organisations.
“Juniper Networks was a strategic investment for us that began in 2005,” says Anthony Laing, GM of networking at XON. “We’ve developed the skills and expertise to be able to work with several tier one mobile and fixed line network operators in several countries across Africa, from Mauritius to Guinea Conakry.”
XON has developed and deployed solutions at the core of telecom and mobile network service provider and enterprise networks to enhance efficiencies, economies of scale, return on investment, scalability, flexibility and interoperability.
Examples include AfricaConnect, the network that is a collaboration of Africa’s UbuntuNet Alliance and the non-profit Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe (DANTE), that connects research and education institutions in 14 African countries with those in Europe and the rest of the world. Fifty million people from 10 000 education institutions use this network.
XON also worked with SEACOM to upgrade its IP.MPLS network for global and African IP transit services for low latencyrouting via African points of presence (PoPs). SEACOM also improved customer’s Internet experience through content cluster deployments and caching nodes on its African IP/MPLS network to accelerate and optimise HTTP content, rich media, downloadable files, video, music, software updates and other Web content.
XON worked with Telecom Namibia to deploy a cutting-edge communications network that delivered the fastest LTE in Africa.
There are many more such projects to reference, such as the rollout of Wi-Fi hotspots across 50 locations in Botswana, and diverse ones such as the provision of alternative energy at 242 base station locations for a telecoms service provider operating in North Africa, the data centre with full redundancy, replication and failover in Guinea Conakry for another large enterprise and the rollout of cloud services for several enterprises in Africa alongside storage, availability and compliance projects conducted for everyone from financial services organisations to mining operations, public enterprise, private enterprise, healthcare, commercial centres and more.
The XON group of companies have also developed and deployed numerous converged networks that allow service providers to offer more granular services to their end user customers. These granular services, both voice and data, allow service providers to differentiate themselves in highly contested markets and break into previously untapped markets by offering consumers value-added services at a fee.
While the core of the network is obviously critical, XON’s award also comes on the back of developing sophisticated edge services, such as edge caching, that relieve pressure on the backbone and reduce international bandwidth consumption while crucially slashing latency and boosting data download speeds for consumers.
“To win this award twice in a row definitely demonstrates to us that we’ve got a winning combination of the right technology from our partner coupled to the skills required to meet the demands of Africa’s telecommunications and networking needs for service providers, enterprises and government organisations,” says Laing.”
