Offering a one-stop solution, Brett Diamond and Justin Giardina, 11:11 Systems

By Puja Sharma

11:11 Systems has been built by acquisitions, now those building blocks are being integrated under the mantra of cloud, connectivity, and security

The company is focused on mid to large enterprises because there is no company now that does not require cloud, connectivity, and security solutions to run their business! IBS Intelligence spoke with Brett Diamond, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of 11:11 Systems, together with the company’s Chief Technology Officer, Justin Giardina. Diamond explained the background to the creation of 11:11 Sytems: “When I looked at starting 11:11 a few years ago, I noticed that there was a gap between companies that were supporting all these different managed services across cloud, connectivity and security, there was not one doing all three. “So, the overall goal was to bring companies together that were specialised in each one of those pillars into a single entity through a single portal system to manage their services across cloud, connectivity and security… where we were [first] going to grow inorganically through M&A, and then focus on organic growth in the organisation.

“We are private equity-backed by [New York-based] Tiger Infrastructure Partners. We also have a lender constituency of 7 different banks. We acquired 2 companies in December 2021, and we acquired 5 more companies in 2022. After doing 7 acquisitions in 11 months, we had to pause to integrate them. Last year, the M&A market was much slower than it had been in previous years. I wouldn’t say that we shied away from M&A, there was just nothing that came across our desk that was that interesting!”

What are your concerns about security?

[JG] “When we work with customers, obviously everybody needs some level of security. We can deliver integrated security services on top of our platform. Say you’re a customer, you’re running your workloads in our cloud, we can offer security in that component. If you are a customer who is interested in having a managed security service, whether in our cloud or on-prem, we also cater those services as well. “We have the ability to leverage AI and ML security products to help fight the bad actors… but it’s a constant battle, cat and mouse game, about being well prepared or let’s call it cyber resilient for our customers to not only protect the front door, but make sure we can recover on the back end too.”

What are you doing to support connectivity?

[BD] “Connectivity, from our perspective, is multi-location managed networks for clients, direct connects to hyper scalers like AWS, where a customer needs to go from their prem to AWS. We are utilising the resources of the carriers that are out there and leveraging the infrastructure they’ve built and putting a management layer on top. We can help you get to the cloud; we can help you connect to the cloud; we can secure your connectivity from your prem to the cloud. All of it ties together. You can’t have one without the other. “We are vendor agnostic. There are different types of connectivity. There are different security layers that you might want to have. There’s not a one-size-fits-all. But because we play very well with multiple vendors in this space, we can help 95% of customers with their needs to support all their work environments.”

[JG] “One thing not to forget about the cloud is it’s new. AWS does networking and compute one way. Azure does networking and compute one way. When companies are looking to offload to the cloud or remove on-prem infrastructures to the cloud, they may not have the staff to do it. They may not have the skill set to do it. So, the idea that we can help them be successful as a business, whether it’s cloud connectivity, security, or one of the above, that’s our niche.”

[BD] “Most companies don’t want to support a CapEx-heavy business anymore. It’s an antiquated way of doing it for most companies out there. They need to go to more of an OpEx, monthly recurring charge environment.”

What about legacy issues?

[JG] “Just because you move to the cloud does not mean that your applications have been modernised to run like a Netflix or an Uber. So, when we talk about migration, a lot of times people are just taking legacy on-prem infrastructures and plopping them in the cloud. That’s where we can help, where, okay, let’s get you there, let’s modernise into a cloud-based service, walk through that journey, because some people still have mainframes, still have Windows, still have physical servers.”

[BD] “The issue is who’s supporting this, because mainframe’s not sexy, but someone’s got to support it, someone’s got to be out there, and the number of companies that are supporting mainframe are decreasing at 3x a faster rate than the ones that are still able to support it. “This is one of the beauties of a cloud solution, that you don’t need to maintain an aging infrastructure, because you can scale up, you can scale down, you can take on new releases of software solutions much more readily than you could do with an on-prem solution.”

What’s next for 11:11 Systems?

[BD] “You’re going to continue to see us focused on integration this year. You are going to see us expand our partnerships with a couple of key players in the industry. We will be M&A focused to a degree. It is not a priority. If we see something that is really advantageous and synergistic or creative to what we’re doing, we’ll go after it. “For now, I would say this year is all about top-line organic growth from the 7 acquisitions and the focus areas of the services that we acquired during those acquisitions. We are now the largest privately held provider of cloud, connectivity, and security through a single organisation.

“We want to continue to support the customer base of 6,000 clients that we have. There are more cross-selling opportunities in our base that we haven’t even come across yet that are probably top of mind this year to our sales reps.”

Are there specific focus regions for you around the world?

[BD] “If I can leverage the hyperscalers, I’d rather utilise their environments where we can. If there’s a region where we need to deploy our own infrastructure, we’ll do it. We’re not opposed to it. The scalability and the speed to deploy leveraging our partners is more advantageous to us than trying to build it ourselves.

[JG] “The focus is going to be where we can offer solutions with the ability that we have now across all the acquisitions, all the cloud connectivity and security features, and bring to the market solutions like cyber resiliency. If you think about a cyber resiliency program, you have a security concept, you have a cloud concept, you have a backup and recovery concept.

“We’re one of the only companies, if not the only company, that can deliver that through a single vendor, single pane of glass. What you’ll see us start doing is bring to market things that are unique to us that solve industry problems like cyber resiliency… at a global scale.”

[BD] “You might have a company that can do some of that, but they’re regionalised. No one else can take on the scope or the size of a Fortune 500 that’s got multiple locations, that needs to do everything across
multiple continents. We can handle that.”