Massive Networks wants to change conversations about connectivity, and also who it has those conversations with. The carrier’s reps stress that connectivity is not a commodity service. Massive is also widening its net to bring in more managed service providers into connectivity services, but the message remains the same whether the target is telecom agents or MSPs.

I sat down with Massive Networks CMO Keith White and channel chief Ken Totura at GTIA ChannelCon to discuss their strategy, which is something of a re-brand.

“With carriers, we're in a race to the bottom. So the connectivity-as-commodity conversation is something we want to change,” White said. “It's not a price factor, it's a performance factor that has to be considered.”

Keith White

White said too many carrier conversations give customers three choices: expensive, middle of the road, or cheap. That’s not the way Massive wants to frame its go-to-market process.

“When you talk about extending the network and high-performance networks, and you start getting technical, their eyes glaze over, and they just go, ‘Give me the middle of the road or give me the cheapest connection, because I need to save some money.’”

Totura added: “Cheaper is not always less expensive. What is the cost if you're a surgeon doing remote robotic management and your circuit goes down? What if you're doing a board of directors meeting across the globe, and that goes down? So we're bringing the value-add into that, and in doing that, we have a couple of non-negotiables. We're always going to work with the fastest conduit we can, the best conduit. Fiber is the coup de grâce. That's a five-millisecond medium compared to a 40-millisecond coax. So we start with that.”

Ken Totura

Massive has been around for more than a decade and is rebranding to focus on private networking and premium internet services. It offers consolidated carrier contracts, high-speed fiber networks and private data streams. It uses AI for anomaly detection and customer service. The goal is to simplify complex networking by providing comprehensive support from sales to engineering.

“What we do is - I call it the GOAT of all internet - we mix up to a five-carrier blend at the nearest POP,” Totura said. “So our customers who buy our premium blended internet at their locations, they're not getting a single home from whoever the last mile provider is. We mix it up at the nearest POP and so we may use this tier one ISP for that one, and that tier one ISP for that one. As far as the customer is concerned, it’s just always working.

“We are not ‘Oh you're up for a renewal on your circuit. Give us a call and see if we can beat the price.’ No, no, no. A lot of people do that. That’s not us. We’re the high-value provider. If you have complexity in larger organizations with multiple locations - because if you get multiple locations, chances are you have multiple carrier contracts, multiple invoices, multiple bills, multiple support. Well, complexity creates risk, and organizations are trying to reduce risk. We consolidate all of that. I didn't say we aggregate, because it's our services that flow through our networks, but we do consolidate to a single carrier.”

White said Massive’s consolidation play should translate seamlessly into an MSP’s business as well as serve telco agents and enterprises.

“We're consolidating circuits, and then we're segmenting data streams, and so we're giving private data streams on these single circuits, and that helps MSPs to deliver services and isolate services for an AWS, isolate services for Oracle, isolate services to a data center,” he said. “We're giving you that private layer to connectivity.”

Totura said a major goal of Massive is to simplify connectivity. “It’s amazing how complicated we’ve made networking,” he said of the industry. “[Our customers] say ‘Wait a minute. That's a lot simpler than I thought.’"