Leaseweb Canada, formed earlier this year when Dutch firm Leaseweb bought Montreal hoster iWeb, has been actively investing in IT in their Canadian operation since then.
Roger Brulotte, CEO, Leaseweb Canada
Leaseweb Canada, launched this spring when Dutch Infrastructure-as- Service provider Leaseweb acquired large Montreal-based web hoster iWeb, made a pair of announcements this week in conjunction with the Collision event in downtown Toronto. They announced the launch of their multi-CDN capability in Canada. They also expanded their CloudConnect service in Canada, allowing Leaseweb customers to directly connect to any of the three big hyperscale companies.
“The heart of iWeb, which is now in its 26th year, didn’t change with the acquisition,” said Roger Brulotte, who was picked by Leaseweb to run the Canadian operation. He had previously been the Canadian General Manager at data transmission infrastructure provider Zayo Group.
“Leaseweb was looking for someone from outside to take over the organization,” Brulotte said, “Leaseweb is also a customer-centric company and we have invested heavily in IT since the acquisition.”
The multi-CDN capability makes use of three separate content delivery network providers, one of which Brulotte described as a large telco well known in the industry with a very large fibre footprint.It uses Automatic CDN switching to select the optimal CDN node for a specific user, leveraging metrics from real user machines such as latency, and throughput to calculate a performance score per CDN node globally, in real time, and avoid latency in the decision-making process.
The ability of multi-CDN to combine multiple content delivery network providers, with a total capacity of over 175 Tbps, also improves the ability of customers to increase their global reach. They will be able to handle any spike using up to 3 global CDNs with real time traffic routing.
“The nodes are for specific types of customers, who are looking at latency throughout,” he indicated. “Having 300 POPs globally also helps us with scale.”
Leaseweb’s multi-CDN can also tailor solutions for demanding customers that are looking for content delivery based on various metric combinations, such as low-cost and high-volume demand with high performance and high availability.
Brulotte said that while Canada is a physically large country with less population, there are many good CDN providers.
“47-50% of companies use CDN, with SMB being our sweet spot,” he indicated.
The other announcement is the launch of Leaseweb Cloud Connect, which Leaseweb has had previously in other geos. It allows Leaseweb customers in Canada to bypass the Internet and directly connect Leaseweb-hosted infrastructure to any of the ‘big three public cloud providers’.
“We are getting access to this after other global geos, but it is important because customers can connect to the Internet with less security, or they can do it through a private connection from our data centre in Montreal,” Brulotte said.
“We are local but also global, so we have a global footprint that can serve partners with customers around the world,” he added.
Customers are able to select different connectivity speeds from 100Mbps to 10Gbps based on their individual budgets and project requirements.
“We serve SMB to large customers, and some will invest in hyperscalers, although we can offer 80% of services at 60% of the price,” Brulotte noted. “If they jump around a lot between hyperscalers, they likely have the wrong solution or the wrong billing model. They tend to stick it out with us and our core services, but Cloud Connect gives them additional options. Cloud Connect is the highway that gets the customer on the highway where they can connect to another data centre.”
Channel is an important part of Leaseweb’s Go-to-Market in Canada.
“We have around 30 solid partners in Canada,” Brulotte said “We want to enhance the channel side of the house with more managed service providers, and we have a channel program that is focused on them. We also partner with technology partners who bring customers to the services, or who have services that we do not provide.”
Leaseweb Canada was the most recent subsidiary the company has established after the Netherlands, following others in the U.S., Asia Pacific, Germany, Australia, the U.K., Japan, Hong Kong and their Content Delivery Network. It is the third largest of these operations. They run a total of 25 data centres, three of which are in Montreal.
