How do they do it in Sweden?

A glance at Sunet's homepage makes one thing very clear: services are central to its mission. The whole page is actually a shop window, with many tiles advertising the offerings. Most services are based on a single commercial product. For video conferencing, there is a Zoom service, and the learning management system on offer is Canvas. But the ultimate goal is made very clear in the header: Sunet offers an 'accessible, secure and scalable e-infrastructure'. The basis for this is Sunet's national academic computer network of the same name.

Sunet people in the institutions

The success of Sunet's services is not only due to good products at lower prices, says Nihlén: "We want to be as close as possible to the needs of the customers." This goes so far that many of Sunet's employees are actually employees of institutions. "With every service, we try to make people from the universities responsible for that service in that local community. Often these are not IT people but people who are involved in education, for example. We pay them for 25 to 75% of their time. But they are part of that community; we are not."

This front office role goes quite far: "If another university wants to use a service, they contact this representative, not Sunet directly. The representative can answer any questions and even send a contract proposal."

Hybrid organisation

So Sunet is actually a kind of hybrid organisation. And not just in terms of staffing. Nihlén: "We are in the process of setting up something called Sunet Drive. It will offer data storage and file sharing, fully hosted by us together with Swedish universities. In this way we avoid the problems with data storage in the clouds of commercial providers."

Cooperation, also for the campus network

The most ambitious project for Sunet at the moment is CNaaS: Campus Network as a Service. Basically, it involves Sunet becoming a partner responsible for designing and maintaining a university's own network, together with the university. 

The idea was floated in Sunet's board of directors, says Nihlén. "They wanted to know if we could design a campus network where you could easily replace hardware components with products from different suppliers. We asked our customers if they were interested, set up a steering committee, developed a basic service and found a launch customer." By now, 3 universities are using CNaaS and 3 more are about to join. But what do campus network managers think of this acquisition? Nihlén: "Well, we are not replacing staff. We are also not forcing our ways, but listening to their wishes and then making a plan together with them on how we can work together in the infrastructure."

Less time, more capacity  

How does it work? "Our starting customer is a small university. It only had half an FTE for network management. We started talking to that person to shape the changes. By now, we have automated most of the management and we monitor their network full time for failures. The network manager saves a lot of time, which he can use for more interesting tasks. And for this, he can call on the combined knowledge of our network team."

"For the second customer," adds Heed, "it wasn't expertise but money that was the driving force. They have a larger network department, but they wanted better equipment for less money. Because Sunet buys on behalf of several universities and is not a profit centre, we can offer network equipment at lower prices. But then they became interested in the network automation we had developed. And the next step was that they let us monitor their network, along with their own team. In fact, our network operations centre monitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I don't think there is a single university in Sweden that does that."

For CNaaS, Sunet brings all parties together

A final advantage of Sunet is that it can get support from the network providers much faster than an individual university. CNaaS thus brings together all the parties involved. Nihlén: "We collect everyone's knowledge and experience and everyone can share in it. In this way, we build a community of experts around the service. I think that works very well."

Text article: Aad van de Wijngaart

Illustration: De Hondsdagen

Translation: Deepl