GLS Overview
GLS is located in Charlotte NC and manages over 40,000 networking devices and servers. We operate from a 30,000 square foot facility that is purpose built to support managing and deploying networks. GLS services are available directly from us or through our carrier partners. We were founded in 1998 and established our managed services business in 2000 at a time of tremendous confusion surrounding carrier services and equipment integration. GLS was established on the notion of bringing value to the market by solving that problem. GLS focuses creating customer value by providing creative managed solutions that optimize network performance and costs. In 2001 GLS designed, built and deployed one of the first large scale DSL VPNs which provided significant cost advantages in delivering best in class applications for the largest pizza delivery company in the USA. Today we manage over 4600+ sites for this customer, which is one of Cisco's largest DMVPN deployments.
In 2005-2006 GLS noticed market trends in the form of declining costs of bandwidth, storage, and computing power combined with virtualization and the investment of data center infrastructure. The cost savings and risk mitigation of a hardened data center facility accompanied by the introduction of MPLS network technologies led companies to the consolidation of their server infrastructure. GLS surmised that applications would not work as effectively over the WAN as they did LAN. This has been affirmed by numerous studies pointing to application performance issues being experienced industry wide. In response, GLS has delivered services designed to help customers improve application performance by managing products from best in class vendors such as Riverbed Technologies. GLS invested in network health tools and the integration of advanced diagnostic systems from Visual Networks and Riverbed. These tools and services help IT organizations better understand application and network performance by delivering real time performance notifications, allowing teams to quickly isolate bottlenecks, and provide intelligence to planning.
During the same time period IPT systems became prevalent and carriers began delivering SIP based services. GLS leveraged VoIP and SIP experience to navigate customer through the treacherous waters of voice and data integration. While much of the market has not fully integrated their voice and data networks, our customers have achieved significant savings of 20-40% through and integrated voice and data design.
GLS offers and services continue to be guided by developing market trends and a concentration on solving customer problems. The integration of voice and data networks that combined native SIP and WAN acceleration deliver significant cost savings and improved application performance. Additionally, GLS provides the tools, reporting, alerting and analysis that enables IT organizations to reduce costs, and perform more effectively and efficiently. We call this approach “The Optimized Network”, which focuses on delivering the following benefits:
Improve Application Performance:
- WAN acceleration managed services
- Out-tasking of managed services
- Performance monitoring, advanced diagnostics, alerting, analysis and reporting
- Voice and Data Integration
- Access Optimization
- Data Streamlining
Our objective is for our customer's to have a competitive advantage by teaming with GLS as a trusted partner. Their network and applications perform better, their IT operation is more efficient, cost effective and their company is poised for a smooth transition into tomorrow's cloud.