CEO Brief #2

Hello everyone!

I’d like to turn it to a nice tradition, therefore, I’m continuing with my second CEO brief. The CEO brief series is dedicated to delivering you guys the latest Heficed news, plans, and opportunities for you, our customers and friends, to be the first ones to try out the newest Heficed products and features. This blog piece includes the main challenges with IP address management, such as IPv4 shortage, increasing IP address prices, no standard RIRs API, and others. Furthermore, I’m going to be telling you about the solutions we’ve developed.

March was pretty intense for us at Heficed. In a good way, of course. We headed to three events in a row, met a lot of interesting people and companies with exciting ideas and partnership opportunities. I also had the honor to take part in the speaking session on the CloudFest scene.

I was talking about Challenges with reliable IPv4 and network management in fast-growing locations. It always excites me to discuss the top obstacles in terms of effective IP address management. Scroll down to see the full video of the speaking session.

We’ve developed the IP Address Market platform and looked at IP address management from a totally different angle. There are several challenges we face in this particular area.

• Legal issues. Scaling up in different markets is complicated by legal regulations. If you want to grow your business in, say, Latin America, you have to have a legal entity, lawyers, accountants, all the working systems over there.

• No standard RIRs API or no API at all. It makes the whole process long and complicated. In fact, some of the RIRs have no API at all.

• Increasing IPv4 prices. The IP address market is getting very expensive. The price of an IP address is going up tremendously fast. In 2018 the price per IP address on average was around 17 dollars. I’ve been talking to the field experts and RIRs, who predict the price might go up to 35 dollars per IP address.

• LoA bureaucracy. Isn’t that weird that in 2019 we still use letters of authorization, signatures, send from one provider to another, which is also kind of scary to see when we have digital signatures and other stuff converted to digital?

• IPv4 shortage. I believe it’s the number 1 challenge we’re facing these days. According to the latest data, there are millions of unused IPv4 addresses. MILLIONS. 822,083,486 of them, to be exact. It’s quite a paradox: RIRs seem to be out of IP addresses, but, at the same time, there are lots of providers who are not using the existing IP resources.

All these challenges are a good reason for Heficed to create an ecosystem for the amount of unannounced and unused IP addresses. We want to utilize Internet resources better. Considering the IP resource waste, we took action – the Switch platform is the right place to manage the resources effectively.

Ask yourself, does it really make sense to buy and own IP addresses, having in mind the increasing price predictions? Still wondering? Let me introduce you to Heficed solutions for effective and successful IP address management. We created an ecosystem, a convenient environment to monetize the IP resources.

• Environment to monetize IP address resources (LIR2LIR). When LIRs or IP owners are using their IP resources, they usually don’t have enough time or are concentrated on their business and probably don’t even think of the possibility to monetize those IP addresses. Therefore, we’ve created a platform. It’s a LIR2LIR kind of platform where IP owners can add the IP address to our platform, and our customers will monetize those IP addresses for them.

• Standards for RIR API. It’s something we’ve been working on to contribute to the whole Internet community. We believe there should be a standard set for the entire Internet. This would get things moving faster.

• BGP/ASN management platform. Unfortunately, there’s not enough public information on BGP/ASN management topic. We are developing and are going to release the new features this month. Our platform users will be able to move, split, and merge selected subnets.

• Virtual/physical server infrastructure. Heficed provides cloud services and bare-metal solutions in 20+ locations worldwide. Since we’re trying to automate the world around us, instead of only having the automation tool for IP address management, we automate every single step of Heficed server infrastructure, too.

• LoA hassle eliminated. Heficed aims to eliminate the bureaucratic Letters of Authorization, whereas, in 2019, we can implement electronic signatures, avoid signing, scanning, and sending out paper letters.

I will be more than happy to see you joining the creation of the new ecosystem. Let’s utilize the Internet resources better and monetize the unannounced IP resources.

Regards,
Vincentas Grinius
CEO / Heficed