Network and voice services
Multivendor data networks, with enterprise voice and contact center converged onto IP. Carrier and circuit strategy across regions, with the design driven by the traffic rather than the brand on the box.
Dataflow Technology
The infrastructure that runs the business, run by someone with nothing to sell you.
Multivendor network and voice, the IT side of the data center, cloud and hybrid, managed services, and the vendor governance that keeps them honest. We have been running networks, data centers, and carriers from the inside since 1994, and we still do it, inside our clients' organizations. We do not resell, and we hold no vendor relationships, so the design answers to your requirements and your budget rather than to a price list.
The practice
Three decades running infrastructure, now spent on the owner's side of the table.
The technology practice grew out of the work Tom Marsh did before Dataflow: enterprise voice across the Hitachi field offices in North America, then global enterprise engineering at Macromedia during its fastest growth. The most visible piece of that work was the platform behind Macromedia's software distribution, which ran at a volume that had no precedent in 2001. The less visible piece was the steady work of running data centers, choosing carriers, and holding costs down while the company scaled.
That is the experience clients buy. We have run the networks, signed the carrier contracts, stood up the compute and storage, and managed the providers, so we know where the failures hide and what the vendors leave out of the proposal. We carry the plan, the budget, and the vendor base, and we are still there when the thing has to run. Today the binding constraint on a data center or network program is as often power, cooling, and energy as it is compute, and we plan for that reality rather than around it. The common requirement across the practice has not changed since the Hitachi years: this is infrastructure that is not allowed to stop.
What we do
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Capabilities.
Most engagements draw on several of these at once. We scope to the problem, not to a service catalog.
Passive optical LAN
A passive optical LAN, built on GPON, as a progressive alternative to switched copper. Lower power draw, far less cabling, longer reach, and simpler operation, which makes it a network modernization and a sustainability decision at the same time.
Data center, the IT side
DCIM, structured cabling, the network fabric, compute and storage, and the capacity and monitoring that keep it honest. We run the other end of the room as well, the cooling and the power and the build itself, which is set out on the real estate and facilities page. It is the same principal on both, so nobody has to own the seam between them.
Cloud and hybrid infrastructure
Public, private, and hybrid, costed by what each workload actually needs rather than by a reference architecture, including the selective return of workloads that belong closer to home.
Managed services and vendor governance
In-sourced and outsourced IT and telecom services held to their service levels, across large vendor and telecom portfolios. The financial side, knowing which terms actually move the number, is grounded in a general management program at Duke's Fuqua School. This is where most of the quiet savings come from.
IT and OT convergence, and security
Bringing building systems, process controls, and the corporate network into one defensible design, delivered secure by design rather than secured afterward. The reference points stay current through the MIT Technology Leadership Program and its Horizon technology briefings.
Our infrastructure assessment is a structured walk from the physical plant up through systems, applications, and policy, and back down again. We run it because most of the failures we find started somewhere no one was looking, usually a layer below or above where the symptom showed up.
Track record
A few things we have done.
Described without naming clients. Confidentiality is part of what clients are buying.
- Accountable for the platform behind Macromedia's software distribution, which stayed continuously available at roughly 100 million downloads a week in 2001. That was before the industry had settled on the term content delivery network. What we were buying then was still called content acceleration.
- Took Macromedia onto IP telephony as Nortel's first IP-phone customer, an early enterprise move to voice over IP.
- Designed, negotiated, and led the migration of a marquee nationwide enterprise from a legacy MPLS network to a disaggregated Ethernet architecture, cutting cost per gigabit by 98 percent.
- Designed the converged unified-communications network for a North American financial institution of more than 2,000 branch locations.
- Designed, negotiated, and oversaw a campus passive optical LAN of more than 8,000 ports, among the largest deployments of its kind in the country.
- Designed a rapidly deployable “cabinet in a crate,” a self-contained equipment and connectivity unit dropped into hundreds of government construction sites worldwide, including active combat zones.
Where technology meets the building
A data center is also a real estate decision. A network refresh is also a power and cabling decision. When an engagement reaches across that line, the Real Estate and Facilities practice is already in the building, working from the same plan.