Over the last three years, FourNet has grown strategically as a business, enhancing services and adding companies to our portfolio, partly through acquisitions which bolster our place in the market.  

Our expansion has partly been required because of a convergence of the IT and communications marketplace and the daily changes in working patterns caused by the pandemic, which I've described before here – a merging of networks, security and applications.  

In addition to these changes in working practices, there has been a huge consolidation in the telco marketplace.  This consolidation has led to far less choice for customers and in many instances compounded already poor levels of service.  The size of these consolidated telco providers makes it difficult for many organisations, for whom connectivity and uptime are critical to their operations, to get the focus and support to ensure their networks run seamlessly.   

We see this consolidation as an incredible opportunity for us to take a different route and offer a different option to our customers as an agile, service focused business.  From today our reliance on others will reduce. Our acquisition of network specialists, 01T provides a crucial 'underlay' to FourNet's current offering, giving us more visibility and control over the networks we use to deliver our customers' services.  

Introducing 01T 

01T is a global network MSP with international reach and global clients. They focus on designing, building and managing high-speed global networks, tailored to the needs of data-centric organisations for whom revenue is directly correlated to the uptime of their connectivity services. 01T operates an agile network, optimised to meet the demands of high capacity, low latency and global reach network requirements. 

Founded in 2009, 01T grew rapidly into a managed service business and has evolved over the last decade into a global network MSP, focused on designing, building and managing high speed global networks, tailored to the needs of data-centric organisations.   

Combining FourNet & 01T  

FourNet's core business revolves around digital transformation, customer experience and cloud migration, particularly for UK critical infrastructure and large Enterprise customers. 

Our skill, expertise and innovation, is in providing 'overlay' services such as communications and CX applications and managed cybersecurity services – on top of 3rd party 'underlay' connectivity. The problem is that we have to rely on those 3rd party companies over whom we have little control.  

Part of our success to date has been in building our highly secure and resilient Agile Cloud and ANTENNA platforms – used by many of our critical infrastructure customers, which include the Prime Minister's Office, dozens of Whitehall departments and agencies, as well as blue light, hospital and utility companies. 

Adding 01T to the FourNet family builds on our growing network infrastructure offering and allows FourNet to provide an enhanced end-to-end service for our critical infrastructure and large enterprise customers who have resilient, reliable, global reach network requirements. 

FourNet's Agile Cloud platform has multiple UK based data centres, connects to multiple SIP platforms and we are the only UK service provider that is on-net with both Nice CXone and Content Guru CCaaS platforms. Agile Cloud also has Security Operations (SOC) and Security Fabric services for SD-WAN and cyber security pre-built within our data centres for our customers to leverage. 

Integrating this unique cloud platform with the 01T underlay core network will allow FourNet to connect large customers to Agile Cloud and for them to consume our services very easily indeed. 

The acquisition will also allow high levels of flexibility around the access network for all our customers.  It also allows us to view and manage the end-to-end network, gaining more control over network implementation and support, where currently we are reliant on 3rd party network aggregators. 

01T benefits too. The company has also experienced the recent changes in the marketplace, where there has been a huge consolidation of telecommunication companies, fewer of them but much bigger competitors.  

For the Brighton-based business to thrive, it also needs to be bigger and by joining FourNet it becomes part of a bigger family of businesses, with more expertise, more customers and more partners.  

There are huge synergies between our two companies and together we will be able to ensure the best in class overlay and underlay and a seamless customer experience with much less reliance on third party support.  

Integrating 01T's core networking into FourNet's cloud and 'secure infrastructure' platforms is an exciting prospect, and we are delighted to welcome the 01T team to FourNet.