Overview
As an IT Strategist and Partner for Bridgepointe Technologies, Chris Sandell’s clients are among the most innovative in the world — and they have extraordinary connectivity needs to fuel that innovation. “I have a handful of companies working in AI/ML content processing and the driverless automation space,” he explains, “but also vertical take-off and lift. You know air taxis are going to take off fairly soon?”
Bridgepointe is a tech advisory and lifecycle management firm and is a part of Zayo’s Channel Partner Network. They help design, market, and sell Zayo solutions across the globe. While they have offices and personnel nationwide, Bridgepointe is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area with many clients exploring the cutting edge of technology. Bridgepointe strategists often look to Zayo when designing solutions for their clients. “They are tech-heavy, manufacturing, and SaaS companies that need a lot of bandwidth,” Sandell says. “They’re typically either fairly fast-growing or already large companies.”
“[Our] customers need scale, from the data center and across geographies… Zayo has been able to provide that and at good price points too. The value with Zayo has been really helpful.”
Bridgepointe: Finding the right solution
As an industry leading tech advisory, Bridgepointe helps companies succeed by focusing on translating tech investments into measurable business outcomes. Sandell says that building trust and value is important in the relationships they form with their client companies. By being able to offer and explore multiple solutions at the same time, customers can be confident that they aren’t missing something in their search. “We can find the right solution at the right price with the right vendor,” says Sandell, “and the client doesn’t have to work too hard for that.”
One of Bridgepointe’s customers is Hive, an AI company that develops a collection of pretrained, cloud-based AI models designed to help various types of platforms understand content. These models are served through an API and are generally built to make online life smarter and more pleasant. They can help companies track copyright infringement, flag inappropriate text or images, and find real estate and dating site scams. More recent models are specialized to help identify deepfakes or AI-generated media originating from platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E.
Hive processes billions of API calls each month, and their client list includes heavy-hitters like BeReal, Reddit, OnlyFans, and Patreon. “They need large pipes for transport from data centers to their large enterprise clients,” Sandell observes. “They’re crunching a lot of data through their ML models.” Recognizing that their services could introduce low-level transport overhead to highdemand platforms, Hive maintains stringent latency standards for itself and publishes lowlatency specifications on its products as a promise to customers.
In its time, Bridepointe has served more than 12,000 mid-market and enterprise clients, helping them to procure, implement, and manage tech services and infrastructure. The team prides themselves on their commissioned-based revenue structure, which allows them to work towards optimal IT results for their clients without costly consulting agreements. “Clients don’t have to consider my value up-front,” Sandell remarks. “My value is more of a by-product of supporting them in the right way.”
Zayo + Bridgepointe: A Likely Pair
Zayo is an important partner for Bridgepointe, because Sandell and his colleagues work with many big data companies with big bandwidth and network performance needs. “They’re producing lots of data for transport, storage, and processing. And it all needs to travel in milliseconds,” Sandell explains. In supporting those demanding customers, he recognizes the importance of Zayo’s large fiber backbone and scalability. “These customers need scale, from the data center and across geographies,” he notes. “Zayo has been able to provide that and at good price points too. The value with Zayo has been really helpful.”
Ultimately, Zayo and Bridgepointe work well together because they understand each other’s needs. For Sandell and his customers, Zayo has been effective at delivering both pre-sale and after. Sandell says the team has been responsive to inquiries and with good information. “We need that from our partners: speed and accuracy are important. The Zayo team also makes sure the price points are where we need them. It’s been a good process.” In turn, Sandell also feels a sense of responsibility to the vendors that support the Bridgepointe ecosystem: “You’ve got to be transparent, let your vendors know where they stand, if they’re in a good position or where they need to improve. In the end, we’re all here to benefit the client.”
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Bridgepointe is a tech advisory and lifecycle management firm and is a part of Zayo’s Channel Partner Network. They help design, market, and sell Zayo solutions across the globe.
Learn more about Zayo: zayo.com/about/
Learn more about Bridgepointe: bridgepointetechnologies.com