Interview
We caught up with CypressTel’s CEO Connee Zhang, Director of International Enterprise Eva Yu, and Affiliate Director of Partnership & Enterprise Improvement Sam Ho to debate the shifting international telecoms market and the rise of AI
Connee, you based CypressTel nearly 20 years in the past – I’m certain 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 a number of change! Over the previous 18 years, CypressTel has developed from a specialist in cross-border connectivity right into a carrier-neutral accomplice 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 international hubs. Alongside the best way, we’ve got constructed a powerful accomplice ecosystem spanning international and regional carriers, information 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 via SD-WAN certifications and a number of business awards, which offer third-party validation of our know-how and operations.
Right this moment, we’re positioned as an SD-WAN + SASE + infrastructure accomplice 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 small business 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 site visitors is steered over the very best accessible paths. Inside OneWAN SASE, AI strengthens risk 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 quicker troubleshooting and enhance fault decision effectivity. AI has been used to automate configurations and minimise human errors
General, AI has helped us transfer from reactive assist to a extra proactive, predictive, and automatic operations mannequin. In parallel, we’re actively creating AIDC (AI information centre) options that mix compute, community, and managed providers, with the aim of constructing an “AI manufacturing facility” 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 constantly analyses telemetry, logs, and alarms to detect anomalies early, counsel seemingly root causes and assist proactive capability planning, serving to to stop efficiency bottlenecks. For buyer site visitors routing, AI evaluates real-time path high quality and recommends — or mechanically enforces — the optimum paths and even allocate bandwidth intelligently for mission-critical functions. 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 functions.
General, this delivers higher resilience, effectivity and safety for our prospects, whereas decreasing operational complexity.
What influence is the speedy progress of the information centre market having on your small business?
(Eva): The speedy enlargement of the information centre market, particularly for AI workloads, is a serious driver of our enterprise. Prospects are rolling out distributed, data- and AI-intensive workloads throughout a number of information centres, clouds, and areas, they usually want safe, high-performance, carrier-neutral entry from branches, customers, and companions into these environments.
CypressTel’s core power is aggregating last-mile entry, web, and native connectivity into information 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 precise mixture of last-mile, web, and SD-WAN paths.
What do you see as the most important problem dealing with 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 threat, altering rules, dynamic know-how evolution and powerful value stress, particularly in delicate areas. They fear about service continuity, information sovereignty, and compliance, whereas nonetheless needing to assist international progress. Conventional single-carrier, MPLS-centric WANs are rigid and costly, so the reply shouldn’t be merely swapping one provider for one more, however disrupting and de-risking the general structure.
CypressTel’s method is to offer 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 threat administration, decrease complete value of possession and steady, safe connectivity for crucial enterprise functions.
With the worldwide telecoms world altering so quickly, how do you place your community infrastructure to align with international community demand?
(Eva): Now we have designed an built-in APAC–China community infrastructure that connects main cities throughout the area through a extremely resilient, high-bandwidth spine. That is supported by a versatileconnectivity infrastructure that brings collectively a number of carriers, information centres, and cloud on-ramps throughout APAC. On high of this, we work carefully with international carriers and cloud suppliers to construct a powerful accomplice 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 mix makes CypressTel a really perfect base for designing, negotiating and working cross-border and regional connectivity options for international 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 typically acts as a specialist APAC/China connectivity companions, aligning international designs with sensible native supply.
In Asia and different rising markets, then again, 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 safety features, whereas creating 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 power lies in being a carrier-neutral SD-WAN + SASE supplier with deep China–APAC regulatory and operational expertise.
How vital is SASE in immediately’s cybersecurity setting?
(Sam): SASE has turn into a foundational structure in fashionable cybersecurity as a result of customers and functions at the moment are in all places — throughout places of work, properties, a number of nations, information centres, public cloud, and SaaS platforms. Conventional perimeter-based safety can’t present constant safety or sustain with this degree 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 allows zero-trust, identity- and context-based entry choices and helps each cloud-first and hybrid-work methods.
In our view, SASE is not an non-compulsory add-on; for a lot of enterprises it’s the core structure for safe connectivity, and we’re effectively positioned to seize this rising demand.
What prospects have shocked you essentially the most, both as a result of their distinctive necessities or how they’ve used your know-how?
(Sam): One standout instance is a number one international insurance coverage group with greater than 60 places of work worldwide, together with a serious presence in China. They have been dealing with excessive legacy MPLS prices, restricted flexibility, and sophisticated site 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, information centres, and branches. This decreased their total community prices, improved visibility, and enabled clear segmentation of various enterprise providers 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–international connectivity.
What are the subsequent steps for the corporate’s progress?
(Connee): Trying forward, we’ll deepen our R&D in AI, SD-WAN, SASE, and AIDC, together with via 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 are going to proceed to increase our APAC and international footprint with extra PoPs and tighter integration with carriers, cloud suppliers, and information centres.
A key focus will likely be constructing an APAC-centric accomplice ecosystem and co-designing options with regional and international know-how companions for industries akin 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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