Interview
We caught up with CypressTel’s CEO Connee Zhang, Director of World Enterprise Eva Yu, and Affiliate Director of Partnership & Enterprise Growth Sam Ho to debate the shifting world telecoms market and the rise of AI
Connee, you based CypressTel virtually 20 years in the past – I’m positive a lot has modified in that point! Inform us concerning the firm’s journey up to now and its largest adjustments.
(Connee): There’s been numerous change! Over the previous 18 years, CypressTel has developed from a specialist in cross-border connectivity right into a carrier-neutral associate for networks, safety, and infrastructure.
Our mission has all the time been to ship dependable, safe and high-performance connectivity throughout China, APAC, and key world hubs. Alongside the best way, we’ve got constructed a powerful associate ecosystem spanning world and regional carriers, knowledge centres, cloud suppliers, and safety distributors. We launched our personal SD-WAN resolution, OneWAN SD-WAN, adopted by OneWAN SASE to handle cloud-first and remote-work safety necessities. These efforts have been recognised by SD-WAN certifications and a number of business awards, which give third-party validation of our know-how and operations.
Right now, we’re positioned as an SD-WAN + SASE + infrastructure associate with AI-driven operations, serving enterprises, carriers, and repair suppliers, and serving to them apply superior applied sciences by leveraging our experience and built-in infrastructure.
We’ve seen AI having a big impact on telecoms firms globally. How has your corporation developed following the rise of AI?
(Connee): AI is now embedded throughout our operations and options. In our NOC [Network Operations Centre], we use AI to detect points earlier and shorten fault-handling time by analysing logs, telemetry, and alarms throughout multi-carrier, multi-region environments. On the OneWAN SD-WAN platform, AI helps optimise routing, capability planning and incident response, making certain visitors is steered over the perfect out there paths. Inside OneWAN SASE, AI strengthens menace detection, anomaly analytics and behavior insights, giving prospects extra clever and adaptive safety. In our community operations, we’ve got adopted AI ChatOps to attain sooner troubleshooting and enhance fault decision effectivity. AI has been used to automate configurations and minimise human errors
Total, AI has helped us transfer from reactive assist to a extra proactive, predictive, and automatic operations mannequin. In parallel, we’re actively growing AIDC (AI knowledge centre) options that mix compute, community, and managed companies, with the objective of constructing an “AI manufacturing unit” throughout APAC.
How are you incorporating AI inside your individual options?
(Sam): AI is embedded all through our networking and safety options.
In community operations, AI repeatedly analyses telemetry, logs, and alarms to detect anomalies early, recommend doubtless root causes and assist proactive capability planning, serving to to stop efficiency bottlenecks. For buyer visitors routing, AI evaluates real-time path high quality and recommends — or robotically enforces — the optimum paths and even allocate bandwidth intelligently for mission-critical purposes. This helps us create extra self-optimising, intent-aware networks that align community behaviour with enterprise priorities. Inside our evolving SASE framework, AI-driven behaviour analytics and anomaly detection strengthen safety for customers, units and purposes.
Total, this delivers higher resilience, effectivity and safety for our prospects, whereas decreasing operational complexity.
What affect is the fast development of the information centre market having on your corporation?
(Eva): The fast growth of the information centre market, particularly for AI workloads, is a significant driver of our enterprise. Clients are rolling out distributed, data- and AI-intensive workloads throughout a number of knowledge centres, clouds, and areas, and so they want safe, high-performance, carrier-neutral entry from branches, customers, and companions into these environments.
CypressTel’s core energy is aggregating last-mile entry, web, and native connectivity into knowledge centres and clouds, utilizing a number of carriers to construct resilient and cost-effective underlay networks. More and more, community and compute are being deliberate as a single, built-in, and managed structure.
We assist prospects determine the place workloads ought to reside — whether or not in a DC, cloud, or on the edge — and the way websites, customers, and companions securely attain them over the suitable mixture of last-mile, web, and SD-WAN paths.
What do you see as the most important problem going through your prospects and what can they do about it?
(Connee): The telecoms business is in a difficult place proper now. Our prospects are navigating geopolitical danger, altering rules, dynamic know-how evolution and robust value strain, particularly in delicate areas. They fear about service continuity, knowledge sovereignty, and compliance, whereas nonetheless needing to assist world development. Conventional single-carrier, MPLS-centric WANs are rigid and costly, so the reply shouldn’t be merely swapping one provider for an additional, however disrupting and de-risking the general structure.
CypressTel’s strategy is to supply a contemporary SD-WAN + SASE overlay that may mix a number of underlay carriers, native web and 4G/5G entry to satisfy the dynamic wants of digital transformation. Unified SASE insurance policies then guarantee constant safety and governance throughout all areas. The result’s higher danger administration, decrease complete value of possession and steady, safe connectivity for vital enterprise purposes.
With the worldwide telecoms world altering so quickly, how do you place your community infrastructure to align with world community demand?
(Eva): We’ve designed an built-in APAC–China community infrastructure that connects main cities throughout the area by way of a extremely resilient, high-bandwidth spine. That is supported by a versatileconnectivity infrastructure that brings collectively a number of carriers, knowledge centres, and cloud on-ramps throughout APAC. On prime of this, we work intently with world carriers and cloud suppliers to construct a powerful associate ecosystem.
Our groups are skilled in navigating advanced native authorized and regulatory necessities, and our bilingual, multicultural expertise pool helps bridge East–West enterprise and cultural variations. This mixture makes CypressTel a perfect base for designing, negotiating and working cross-border and regional connectivity options for world prospects.
Do you see main regional variations in SD-WAN and personal community markets?
(Eva): Sure, there are clear regional variations in market maturity and priorities. Within the US and Europe, SD-WAN adoption is already mature, and the main focus has shifted in direction of SASE, multi-cloud optimisation, and zero-trust safety. In these markets, CypressTel usually acts as a specialist APAC/China connectivity companions, aligning world designs with practical native supply.
In Asia and different rising markets, alternatively, many organisations are nonetheless migrating from MPLS/IP-VPN and wish native know-how and various last-mile choices. Developed markets are likely to prioritise consumer expertise, visibility, and superior security measures, whereas growing markets focus extra on availability, value and mobile-first entry, however nonetheless need centralised management. In China and wider APAC area, prospects additionally want experience in China entry, compliance, and cross-border efficiency.
CypressTel’s energy lies in being a carrier-neutral SD-WAN + SASE supplier with deep China–APAC regulatory and operational expertise.
How vital is SASE in right now’s cybersecurity setting?
(Sam): SASE has change into a foundational structure in trendy cybersecurity as a result of customers and purposes at the moment are in every single place — throughout workplaces, houses, a number of international locations, knowledge centres, public cloud, and SaaS platforms. Conventional perimeter-based safety can not present constant safety or sustain with this stage of agility. SASE converges networking and safety right into a cloud-delivered mannequin, giving organisations centralised visibility and coverage management throughout all entry factors. It permits zero-trust, identity- and context-based entry choices and helps each cloud-first and hybrid-work methods.
In our view, SASE is now not an non-obligatory add-on; for a lot of enterprises it’s the core structure for safe connectivity, and we’re nicely positioned to seize this rising demand.
What prospects have shocked you probably the most, both as a consequence of their distinctive necessities or how they’ve used your know-how?
(Sam): One standout instance is a number one world insurance coverage group with greater than 60 workplaces worldwide, together with a significant presence in China. They had been going through excessive legacy MPLS prices, restricted flexibility, and sophisticated visitors administration between abroad areas and their China operations.
CypressTel delivered carrier-neutral last-mile and web entry in China, mixed with OneWAN SD-WAN throughout their HQ, knowledge centres, and branches. This decreased their total community prices, improved visibility, and enabled clear segmentation of various enterprise companies worldwide.
What shocked us most was how shortly this extremely regulated monetary establishment embraced SD-WAN and web underlay as soon as they noticed the operational, safety, and compliance advantages for his or her China–world connectivity.
What are the subsequent steps for the corporate’s development?
(Connee): Wanting forward, we’ll deepen our R&D in AI, SD-WAN, SASE, and AIDC, together with by joint labs and innovation programmes with companions. We plan to additional improve OneWAN SD-WAN & SASE with stronger safety, automation, and AI-driven operations and options tailor-made for cloud and AI workloads. We’ll proceed to increase our APAC and world footprint with further PoPs and tighter integration with carriers, cloud suppliers, and knowledge centres.
A key focus will probably be constructing an APAC-centric associate ecosystem and co-designing options with regional and world know-how companions for industries comparable to manufacturing, retail, finance and logistics. On the similar time, we’re investing in expertise and organisational agility in order that we are able to keep forward of know-how shifts and market adjustments.
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