Revolutionizing converged network engineering to attain business objectives: 3GCGroup

As organizations face the demands of the present business world, technology advances make new services and business models possible that become necessary for enterprises to adopt if they want to maintain their edge in a hyper-competitive world. The new trends of mobility, IOT, virtualization, hyper convergence, cloud, etc., shape all industries making the quality and performance of the business network a fundamental factor in determining their ability to move forward. 3GC Group is one such company that offers the benefits of the converged IP network and highlights the ways which can help businesses take advantage of the best features offered by the latest developments in technology.

3GC Group was established in January 2003 as a result of enterprise and carrier businesses that were ill-served by the technology service providers who were inexperienced with the “Converged Networks” movement in technology; migrating all business communication applications onto a unified data network. “Our mission is to make our clients networks run at its full capacity and maximize their investments”, said CEO Henry Park. The core philosophy of 3GC Group is servicing clients around converged networks by having each of its engineers achieve expertise and experience across multiple IT disciplines. As the needs of its customers have grown and the IT industry has evolved, this core philosophy called E-cubed has allowed 3GC Group to expand and provide higher levels of efficiency translating into both cost and time savings for its clients. Through continued focus on multi-disciplinary engineers, 3GC Group provides consulting, solution design, implementation, and full-scale MSP services to clients throughout the US and internationally across a broad range of network infrastructure technologies.

Deploying converged networks for wide range of applications

The first projects3GC Group did were in two segments. The first one was setting up Cisco media gateways and routers for VoIP carriers and calling card companies, and the second was setting up hosted VoIP based PBX’s for GoBeam, the first venture funded and hosted PBX company.

Companies with high call volumes were setting up their own VoIP routes to reduce high long distance costs. Calling cards and small VoIP companies were using this to become competitive over the global carriers and were dispensing the cards in vending machines or providing cheap VoIP phones for immigrants to call back home. These calling cards and VoIP rates were a fraction of what long distance companies were charging. Eventually the carriers caught on and started using the VoIP traffic to blend into their own and reduce their own long distance costs. 3GC got so good at layering voice on to networks that it started doing them for carriers and eventually became the engineering arm of Covad’s hosted VoIP service. Back then it wasn’t called cloud, it was hosted. Covad acquired Gobeam and brought 3GC in as their engineering fulfillment arm. Thus,  3GC Group grew quickly between 2004-2006 without a sales force and it was able to open up its office in Nor-cal as it grew to be tier 2 support for Covad in Nor-cal.

Focus on customer satisfaction

Back when 3GC was first getting started, VoIP protocols were just getting standardized and as VLAN’s were new, the network had to be perfect for good call quality, requiring senior level network engineering resources.  There were few engineers in the market who knew how to manage these configurations, so business was great and 3GC’s clients were happy. At this point though, 3GC Group wasn’t setup to be a managed services provider and neglected to put financial boundaries around the parts of the client’s networks which needed to be managed to ensure call quality.  So when clients complained about any call quality issues they would troubleshoot the problems for free, and with so many calls, they were losing money. This brought a great learning experience in customer service and contract negotiations to the company.  Over time 3GC learned how to keep the same level of customer satisfaction and turn a profit by providing custom fit managed services programs but the first few years were tough operationally and financially.

Taking the idea of convergence to the next level

Previously hardware and virtualization layers had to be managed separately but with hyper convergence, all layers from hardware to the top application layer can be managed together, gaining tremendous speed in managing network infrastructure as a single system. Software defined networking is a big trend these days as many companies utilize the cloud and flatten their network architecture. With the push of data into cloud infrastructure the need for bandwidth over the internet is growing immensely. Emerging technologies are eliminating the need for expensive MPLS networks moving towards SDN, and hyper convergence removes the need for intensive admin management of servers and storage.  Further, with the advent of shadow IT, artificial intelligence driven behavior based cyber security technologies are needed to keep data secure on the network.

With so many layers of the network converging on single platforms bound by software, there are more overlapping of features and network segments than ever before. Design and architecture is all the more important today to optimize these new technologies and convergence.  3GC provides full design, implementation, managed services and staff augmentation for an end to end solution.  In addition, 3GC can wrap the next generation converged network into a HaaS (Hardware as a Service) contract making the full network infrastructure operations into an off balance sheet operating expense.

CEO Henry Park said, “I see us expanding our managed services into the hybrid cloud architecture and providing automated DevOps platforms for clients to use.”  He also believes that blockchain can bring a big opportunity for the company and envisions becoming experts in blockchain in 5 years.

Knowing the CEO, Henry Park

Henry brings a unique background in investment banking and technology, with vast experience in industry trending and analysis, as well as sales and marketing. With a B.S. in Economics from UC, Irvine, Henry has aided in several mergers and acquisitions in the plastics and rubber industry to create competing brands against behemoths such as Goodyear, Proctor and Gamble. Prior to 3GC Group, Henry held several mid and upper management, sales and marketing positions within the CLEC and IT consulting industries. He also holds a minor in Psychology from UC Irvine, and has an Executive MBA from Tuck University. Henry has also broadened his skills in the space of architect networks, VAR Operations management, Finance management / strategy and orchestrating M&A’s.

"Being in the IT industry our collective passion for technology is the obvious driving force for our growth. But the underlying drive for our excellence above our competitors comes from an obsession over eliminating, inefficiency and optimizing networks.”