For Epsilon, and many other businesses, 2020 was a year that was defined by unexpected events and disruption. We conducted a review of our business and set a path for the future. Despite the unforeseen challenges, we have had a successful year in supporting our customers around the globe. We have also taken crucial steps to maximise the potential of our business and deliver better services and experience for our customers in 2021 and beyond.
If anything, 2020 gave us time to reflect on our core values and how we position ourselves in the market. We’ve refined our service portfolio and roadmap, consolidated our operations, developed great partnerships and brought tremendous talents on board.
With a surge in the number of people working from home, there has been huge demand for digital collaboration and communications solutions. As a result, cloud adoption and spending have increased, and we believe this will continue throughout 2021.
I’m very proud of the whole Epsilon team for pulling through these difficult times, continuing to meet and exceed our customers’ needs and expectations, and coming out even stronger than before.
Our 2020 Milestones
Some of our recent milestones include the acquisition of 7D Digital, which is a company that supported the development of our on-demand platform, Infiny. We saw an opportunity to bring the 7D team into Epsilon to focus even more resources on the evolution of platform, and the best way to do this was by acquiring the company.
The team at 7D are fully integrated into the team at Epsilon, and we’re really excited to have them onboard. We’ve been busy behind the scenes enhancing and refining Infiny to deliver superior user experience and position it to be our primary customer engagement platform.
Another significant achievement in 2020 was establishing our partnership with Aviatrix to deliver a market-leading multi-cloud solution. As a result of our enhanced capability, Epsilon Cloud Networking services, will better address the advanced requirements for our enterprise and managed service provider customers’ needs and helping them to grow in the cloud without barriers.
On top of these big announcements, we built momentum throughout the year with the launch of our multi-service port in February, becoming a LINX platinum partner in April and the appointment of Craig Forrester as our new Chief Financial Officer in May. We were also joined by Simon Waller as our Regional Sales Director for EMEA and the US, along with a number of partnerships and customer engagements throughout the year including maincubes, NAPAfrica, BCX and InterNexa.
Priorities for 2021
Businesses and service providers today want to deliver application performance and user experience that support better business outcomes. As a result, they need to be able to connect, manage and secure their applications and data with greater efficiency and control. We are simplifying this increasingly dynamic and complex networking ecosystem by enabling access to on-demand connectivity across cloud, internet exchanges, data centres and global destinations.
As we move into 2021, we are committed to enabling more businesses to connect to the global cloud infrastructure they need in a simple and powerful way.
• Innovate Through Partners – For 2021, it will be about focusing on our partner strategy. We already have a strong interconnect ecosystem of cloud providers, networks and internet exchanges stretching across 260 of the leading data centres in 41 cities, but we want to grow this further. One of our differentiator lies the relationships we have with our technical and strategic partners around the world.
By building solutions through partnerships, we can deliver best-of-breed solutions to our customers. Rather than competing against specialists in certain fields, we believe in partnering with these companies to enhance our interconnection services and bring the best possible solutions to our customers as quickly as possible. We look forward to announcing more partnerships that we’ve got planned for 2021, which will expand our capabilities and service offering.
• Enhance Customer Experience with Infiny – Our self-service NaaS platform Infiny currently offers three powerful networking solutions – Interconnection between the leading data centres, direct connections to cloud hyperscalers and access to the world’s largest internet exchanges. We also offer a variety of voice services including the ability to procure inbound numbers on-demand.
Infiny is becoming the one-stop platform for our customers to buy and manage their services. It is also the centrepiece when it comes to delivering customer experience and presenting the full benefits of using Epsilon services.
In 2021, we will devote additional time and resources into evolving Infiny to be our central customer engagement platform. Customers can rapidly provision new services globally while eliminating the traditional procurement headaches such as pricing, lead times and service performance visibility. We’re working hard to bring even more functionality to Infiny and add new features to make it a complete end-to-end platform for our customers.
• Growing our Business – We are focused on growing our business in APAC, EMEA and the US by engaging with our existing customers and developing new relationships, especially with channel partners and enterprise customers.
As APAC will be a very important region for us, we recently appointed Warren Aw as our Managing Director, Asia-Pacific to help us accelerate growth across specific countries in the region.
• Expand Our Data Services – In 2020, we had achieved growth across our data, colocation and voice portfolios. However, we realised there are huge opportunities in our data business unit that we have yet to fully capitalised on. Our main investments in 2021 will be focused on building our data solutions and driving profitable growth across the key services including cloud networking, data centre interconnect and peering.
Moving Forward
We are rapidly changing to match the needs of our customers across the three core segments of carriers, channel partners and enterprises. 2021 will be all about staying very focused on evolving our offerings to address our customers’ needs and continuing to deliver a great level of customer service. We are constantly innovating and bringing leading technology partners with complementary capabilities.
By the end of the year, we will have an even stronger partner ecosystem and have positioned Infiny as our primary customer engagement platform with an array of services and value-added features. Our channel partner programme would have helped many of our managed service provider and data centre partners to capture new revenues.
At our core, we are in the business of connecting global businesses and always have been. We are trusted by some of the world’s largest carriers and most innovative businesses because of our proven experience and ease of doing business.
No matter what 2021 throws at us, we have already seen that we are a resilient business with great talents that is ready to respond to market demands and grow with our customers.
Michel Robert
Chief Executive Officer