Michael Weers
To capture your subject takes lots of patience and focus, and sometimes you also need a sixth sense - it’s always useful to know a little more.
Who is NL-ix?
Behind the world of the Internet, behind the world of fibers, protocols, peers and terabits, are actual people making it all work. But who are these people? In other words: Who is NL-ix?
Today: 🤝 Michael Weers, Manager Customer Care
My roots are in Rotterdam where I have lived most of my life but now that we have five-year-old twins, we moved a little further out, where there is more space and serenity.
Besides my work at NL-ix I am also a passionate photographer – everything from portraits, pregnancy, newborns to family fun and sometimes formal occasions like weddings. When there is spare time, I also love to capture wildlife. To capture your subject takes a lot of patience and focus, and sometimes you need a sixth sense - it’s always useful to know a little more. Watching a fox, you need to understand him to photograph him, and the same goes for newborns! Good photography requires patience and curiosity with complete focus. These capabilities are very useful for managing Customer Care and daily Operations.
IT has always been my passion, ever since I studied System Admin. Since then, I have done a lot of different jobs within IT such as System Engineer; Sales; Recruitment; Operations Manager and Project and Service Management. Project and Service Management is an interesting combination because you can’t just race to completion in the project and then walk away. You must continue after the project and deliver the service you promised otherwise the chickens will come home to roost. I’ve found these skills very useful in previous roles but also here at NL-ix.
I spent many years with Proserve, who provide mission-critical infrastructure environments. We built a lot of things there and it was an intense round-the-clock environment. After the children were born, I moved on to Van Oord, the long-established Dutch marine contractor that builds artificial islands like the Palm in Dubai. I was working with them when the Corona virus hit, and a lot of the fleet was stuck in isolation for months with a 1 Mbps satellite link. Just imagine. It’s at times like that it really hits you how important the Internet is!
Since I joined NL-ix two years ago I have been responsible for daily Operations. The fun part is that, because my team is quite small, I can do other things too – like project and service management for some customers. This means scoping the project, setting deadlines, clearing lines of communication and, where possible, teaching on the job. I also learn a lot.
To capture your subject takes lots of patience and focus, and sometimes you also need a sixth sense - it’s always useful to know a little more.
Michael Weers
One of the projects I most enjoyed was upgrading the core network of a major supermarket chain, which I saw through from start to finish. I have also been involved in rolling out our Elastic Interconnect service for a big bank. I think we are in a sweet spot as a business, as we let customers see what they are communicating with and to who, and that’s something that a lot of enterprise customers don’t understand or know, because this is managed inside the applications. For a lot of people security used to be just a check in a box, but in a multi-cloud world it must be integral to a company’s infrastructure, and NL-ix is one of only a handful that can help businesses separate their public and private traffic streams and give them real control.
I think what we do, is strategically important, particularly in a multi-cloud world. The technical level of the NL-ix business is impressive, with over 6 Tbit/s of traffic and we also have some of the smartest network engineers in the business that I am proud to be colleagues with.
Please contact Michael if you have any questions.
