Rick Mur

Limitless Networking

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Read a book!

At the start of this year I set myself a number of goals. One of them was to read at least 1 book a month. I tried to accomplish a number of things with that.

Why

The first was to get the amount of screen time down. This also means reading books on paper, which I actually prefer over reading on a screen. I may try an E-reader at some point, when I run out of physical books to read. The second was to finally read all of these books I bought, but never touched and all the books that were recommended to me and I never did anything with. Finally I wanted to increase my concentration span again, as I feel that with all distraction we are facing, this is going down a lot. I experienced this as well, that I’m easily distracted when reading articles online.

Now 7 months after I started, I feel really good about lowering the screen time hours, slightly increasing my concentration span and learning a lot! Besides that, I also achieved my goal already as I just finished the twelfth book.

The list

The books I read are a mix of productivity/professional and pleasure/fiction. I try to mix reading one work or professional life related book and one book I read for pleasure.

These are the books I read so far in 2019 in order that I read them:

My favourite so far is GRIP (unfortunately only available in Dutch right now), which has changed my way of structuring my work tremendously. Second is The Mastermind, which is an unbelievable true story, you can also listen to Reply All Episode 136 to get a first sense of how insane this story is.

More!

I really appreciate reading again and I’m definitely going forward with this and hope to read and learn a lot for the remainder of the year. Do you have any good recommendations? I’m interested in both professional and fun/fiction books to read!

New beginnings!

After long consideration I decided to take on a new role back at Juniper Networks! Over the past few months I have thought a lot about what I want in the future and how I can get there. When I had a chat with an ex-colleague at Juniper, he told me that they were looking to set-up a new team in EMEA. I decided to take a shot and got in touch for a SE role in that team. After a long series of interviews they asked me to consider a different role, where I would be leading (Public) Cloud accounts in EMEA. I gave it a long thought, but decided to go for it! I think this will give me a huge opportunity to use all the entrepreneurial things I learned over the past 2 years and bring a great challenge to grow this team!

What about GNX?

GNX is definitely not going away. My co-founder stays on full-time to service our customers and I will also stay on to focus on our automation portal, but as we remain a bootstrapped start-up, I think it is the right decision for me to take a step aside and focus my full-time attention on Juniper.

Juniper Networks

Going back to a vendor really excites me and is also the place where I felt most comfortable in my career. I’m overly excited to build out a huge business opportunity for Juniper in EMEA and focus on the largest (data center) network infrastructures that are out there!

Juniper is doing really well in this area as Garntner has confirmed in their latest Data Center Networking Magic Quadrant. Which didn’t even take into consideration the latest platforms that have been released. If you are interested please download the report here: 2019 Gartner Data Center Networking report

Innovation

I think that we are in a very good place right now, where a lot of new technology is coming to the market in a rapid pace. Innovations like Segment Routing, that gives much better control of traffic engineering even inside the data center. Especially combined with Juniper cRPD. To give applications on hosts actual control over how the traffic traverses the network (SDN anyone?). Or innovations in the disaggregation of hardware and software with SONiC (combined with cRPD).

Junivator

I look forward to talking to many people around EMEA about these new hardware and software innovations. I will be at NXTWORK 2019 in Las Vegas and London. If you are interested. Register now! 

Next Generation Global Connectivity

Technologies like SDWAN have fundamentally changed the way we think about WAN infrastructures for enterprise IT environments over the past few years. Global WAN offerings are no longer a necessity as pretty much ‘any’ connectivity will do. You are no longer bound to private (MPLS-based) connections/networks. Software and smarter routing mechanisms will fix all your problems, if you talk to the SDWAN vendors, but this leaves an important piece of the puzzle missing. You still need a (large/worldwide) Service Provider to arrange this global connectivity for you.

Subscription Economy

Over the past few years we have become so used to the habit of going online, click a few times and order anything we want. People nowadays are more interested in access over ownership. When access is all that counts, than the one offering the most fluent and easy access wins! If this is the case, then why is there no neutral and independent portal, where I can look for worldwide connectivity options? This is the foundation of GNX, the new company that I co-founded!

GNX

GNX aims to become a leader in worldwide connectivity for Enterprise customers. As CTO I’m responsible for all technical aspects of our organization. From architecting our custom software, our infrastructure, heading up the development team to speaking at worldwide events about SDWAN and the impact GNX can have on offering connectivity services to Enterprises. Helping customers designing their next generation WAN. The goal of GNX is to offer an automated self service portal to quote, order, deliver, bill and support worldwide connectivity under a single contract, SLA and invoice with assistance from our fanatical inside support team that helps you with sales, but also with engineering your connectivity!

SDWAN-your-way

Combined with the power of SDWAN fully integrated in our offering, GNX offers anything from ‘just’ an Internet connection to a fully managed worldwide WAN service, but also leave the decision power with the customer. Do you want to have full control over your SDWAN solution? Sure! Do you want us to manage the migration and the first year of service? Sure! You only need connectivity for your SDWAN deployment? Sure!

I believe the next generation WAN is all about having choice. SDWAN solves the first half of the problem, GNX the second half.

Carrier Neutral

Giving choice means being completely carrier neutral in our service offering. We can offer services from hundreds of local carriers. This means that we can maintain a clear communication path from our customer to the supplier and can keep a customer much better informed about the service purchased.

Frictionless

The combined power of our full feature portal, fanatical support staff, carrier neutral services and flexible offering, means we offer customers fluent and frictionless access to global connectivity.

Why you?

The reason I got so excited for starting this company, is that I feel I can use all aspects of my experience working on many sides of the networking business. I can learn a lot from the developers that are currently working extremely hard to have our MVP finished as soon as possible so we can start our beta programs later this year. On the other hand I can re-use much of the knowledge I gained working for a VAR, Cisco and Juniper and use that to build the right tool to solve global connectivity challenges.

I honestly have never felt more excited about my work and I look forward to share that with you on this blog!

If you’d like to stay updated on the progress GNX is making or if you want to get in touch with us, visit our website: https://gnx.net

Rick Mur

[email protected]

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