Built For Trust With Nick Lippis
Oct 15, 2026 · 42 min · 11 segments
When a construction crew cut a backup circuit with the primary already offline, flights stalled across five airports for eight hours. Enterprise networks have gotten smarter, but ISP management is…
They raced, it was right in the thick of this whole rush or gold rush with telecom, which is for everyone.
kind of often gets compared to the AI gold rush that's happening right now.
So they were one of the first who raised a lot of money, were incredibly successful, and had phenomenal culture, really good product.
disintegrated, but they had a 10-year run that was amazing and produced a whole bunch of leaders in the industry that are doing big things today.
And even they, as great as they were, still could not deliver to the level of the rest of the technology level that we're all...
So at that time, I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation in their telecom department.
And so it was my job to kind of evaluate which products that we were going to buy um to we built this large private fiber optic network and then some now so great we had fiber like to all of our facilities um but we still had lots of pbx's all over a lot of private voice network and so we wanted to integrate that so i did a lot of the kind of analysis and product selection for like network equipment technologies at the time stratacom time plex i'm sure you kind of knew all these products you know that were that were out there so Yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't know that we had that intersection in our career, you know, around that, you know, around that space.
So, so that, so anyway, so that's really great, you know, and then, so Z-Link, you talked a little bit about, you know, Z-Link, you know, around kind of ISP operational management and mitigation and making it a lot simpler, right? So I think, you know, one thing that, that seems to be true throughout my career.
I'm sure it's the same thing with yours is that, um, networking in a particular the wide area is mostly taken for granted we kind of like when it's running it's running and you know very seldomly really does it do you get outages um but when you do it fails super fast and super big um and i think in in the notes that we had exchanged you mentioned kind of the verizon i think fiber cut that um, you know, at Newark airport, you know, so that you have, you know, thousands of flights that were canceled, you know, uh, the cost of that.
And those are the times when you kind of realize the dependency, um, that you have, uh, on, uh, on that infrastructure.
So I guess the question is also going back to, you know, Z-Link, you know, it's why ISP management stays, it's like so invisible, you know, um, until, um, something really goes wrong.
They raced, it was right in the thick of this whole rush or gold rush with telecom, which is for everyone.
kind of often gets compared to the AI gold rush that's happening right now.
So they were one of the first who raised a lot of money, were incredibly successful, and had phenomenal culture, really good product.
disintegrated, but they had a 10-year run that was amazing and produced a whole bunch of leaders in the industry that are doing big things today.
And even they, as great as they were, still could not deliver to the level of the rest of the technology level that we're all...
So at that time, I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation in their telecom department.
And so it was my job to kind of evaluate which products that we were going to buy um to we built this large private fiber optic network and then some now so great we had fiber like to all of our facilities um but we still had lots of pbx's all over a lot of private voice network and so we wanted to integrate that so i did a lot of the kind of analysis and product selection for like network equipment technologies at the time stratacom time plex i'm sure you kind of knew all these products you know that were that were out there so Yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't know that we had that intersection in our career, you know, around that, you know, around that space.
So, so that, so anyway, so that's really great, you know, and then, so Z-Link, you talked a little bit about, you know, Z-Link, you know, around kind of ISP operational management and mitigation and making it a lot simpler, right? So I think, you know, one thing that, that seems to be true throughout my career.
I'm sure it's the same thing with yours is that, um, networking in a particular the wide area is mostly taken for granted we kind of like when it's running it's running and you know very seldomly really does it do you get outages um but when you do it fails super fast and super big um and i think in in the notes that we had exchanged you mentioned kind of the verizon i think fiber cut that um, you know, at Newark airport, you know, so that you have, you know, thousands of flights that were canceled, you know, uh, the cost of that.
And those are the times when you kind of realize the dependency, um, that you have, uh, on, uh, on that infrastructure.
So I guess the question is also going back to, you know, Z-Link, you know, it's why ISP management stays, it's like so invisible, you know, um, until, um, something really goes wrong.
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