Back9Network, a burgeoning golf lifestyle network, moved into its new 13,000 square-foot facility located in downtown Hartford in the Phoenix building at One American Row. The new space includes offices and digital production areas, in addition to a 100-seat hosted VoIP business phone system.
Faced with all the complexities that coincide the launch of a start-up broadcast network and the construction of a new corporate headquarters (HQ), Reid Gorman, Back9Network’s Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder said, “It was nice to offload telecom to a trusted resource. We met with Darren (DeMartino) from Advanced Technology Consulting (ATC) and let his team go to work. We knew the project was in good hands.”
Back9Network former host Jenn Bosworth
ATC worked with the Back9Network leadership team to understand their current state and desired future state for telephony and Unified Communications (UC). ATC evaluated a variety of hosted VoIP providers and landed on Masergy’s UC as a Service (UCaaS) solution.
(Interested in UCaaS or an MPLS network, contact us.)
UCaaS and MPLS Masergy delivers its UCaaS services from servers housed in secure, geographically redundant data centers. In the unlikely event that one data center is unavailable, communications traffic is automatically routed to other data centers, ensuring business continuity and back up. Unlike premise-based solutions, Masergy’s hosted UCaaS requires no hardware to provision, no software to buy, install or configure, and no elaborate training for in-house staff.
Back9Network also uses Masergy Communicator, a cross-platform software application, to enable their employees to take voice calls from clients, securely instant message co-workers, and engage in video chats even when they are out of the office using a smartphone or tablet.
The UCaaS solution ideally suits Back9Network’s business needs for agility and mobility in a time of explosive growth. “The system is easy to manage. And, as we add personnel and locations, it’s very easy to expand,” said Gorman.
Back9Network’s UCaaS solution runs across a (Masergy) fully managed Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network leveraging a 3MB data circuit. MPLS is a standards-based technology for speeding up network traffic flow. In addition to moving traffic faster, MPLS makes it easy to manage a network for quality of service (QoS). MPLS is becoming more readily adopted as networks begin to carry more and different mixtures of traffic.
Prior to moving to the new HQ and digital media studio, Back9Network was launched in a small broadcast facility on Lewis Street in Hartford. Now, Back9Network is re-populating those offices and will soon open a brand new TV production studio in downtown Hartford’s Constitution Plaza, adjacent to the corporate HQ.
Back9Network is considering a dark fiber connection between the two buildings that house the studio and the corporate HQ, in addition to a point-to-point data solution for Lewis Street and the corporate HQ. ATC and Masergy will continue to support Back9Network’s growth and ensure seamless high-performance communications.
More On Back9Network Back9Network’s corporate headquarters and TV/video production studio are a central part of the rebirth of downtown Hartford. Back9Network joins ESPN, NBC Sports and YES Network in Connecticut, which is quickly becoming the sports media capital of the world.
Back9Network was developed as a complementary alternative to traditional media’s focus on professional golf tournament coverage. Its focus is on compelling storytelling, interesting personalities and characters, features and fashions, interviews and instruction, travel, gear and more.
The network’s leadership team is headed by James Bosworth, Founder and CEO. Bosworth was one of six witnesses recently asked to testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.
