QOS Networks Chief Executive Frank Cittadino.
QOS Networks
It was a fantasy football owner’s greatest nightmare.
A blitz of outages on the CBS Sports
VIAC,
website last week momentarily derailed drafts just days before the season opener, disrupting the selections of customers and leading to a public apology from the site.
The outage was the latest reminder that interruptions in internet service are part of the new normal as millions of Americans exclusively work and play from home, taxing the grid’s infrastructure. An AWS outage in Northern California this month forced at-home workers to scramble to local cafes for internet access.
Complicating matters, digital transformations at most corporations that increasingly rely on edge computing and cloud services have put a premium on quality of service anytime and anywhere.
“Because end-users are now interacting differently, digital transformation is beginning to shift. That is shifting the innovation pattern away from a traditional buying experience to ‘how do we best serve a person no matter where they are going to buy,’” Frank Cittadino, chief executive at QOS Networks, told MarketWatch. The 7-year-old startup is partnering with Amazon.com Inc.’s
AMZN,
AWS, Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
and Google parent Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
GOOG,
and its customers include Nike Inc.
NKE,
and Public Storage
PSA,
QOS is part of a booming niche market in the tech landscape whose mission is to give enterprises seamless network capabilities that “is more of a showroom experience versus a stockroom experience,” Cittadino says, referring to a dynamic experience online versus touching what is available in a store.
Case in point: The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, according to a recent study by market researcher Gartner. But as companies scale up in size and services, downtime can cost up to $540,000 per hour, Gartner found.
Cittadino, who cut his corporate teeth at Home Depot Inc.
HD,
helped start QOS because the “internet was still very expensive for businesses, the contracts were really bad, telecoms were difficult to work with and it was prime for disruption.” He anticipates more companies will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict network outages.
And that is just in time, as the economy rebounds to pre-pandemic plateaus. Some 60% of 465 CEOs polled worldwide by Gartner said they anticipate a return to economic growth this year or in 2022.
Gloss