Vincent Bourgonjen
The words I use to describe our Transit service are ‘effortless optimal routing”
Who is NL-ix?
Behind the world of the Internet, behind the world of fibers, protocols, peers and terabytes, are actual people making it all work. But who are these people? In other words: Who is NL-ix?
Today: 🤝 Vincent Bourgonjen, Network Engineer
My name is Vincent Bourgonjen and I live in Den Haag. I've always been interested in science and technology. After studying Computer Science I started work as a Software Engineer, then a System Administrator. For me the Internet started with emails and seeing pictures downloaded, line by line.
I started with NL-ix as a Network Engineer in 2002, so you could say I’m a veteran. I started by taking over network activities from Jan as he built the business. As we grew I moved onto customer provisioning. I switched back to managing the backbone, then I joined the new software team. This year we merged part of the software team with the network management team. Together with others I interface between those teams, talking both languages.
We currently have two services with a strong software component; Elastic Interconnect, which allows to flexibly steer and secure your traffic, and our own type of Transit. NL-ix Transit combines a few of our services into one, and the software takes care of the routing decisions. The words I use to describe our NL-ix Transit service are ‘effortless optimal routing’. Like other NL-ix services, what we offer is something a bit easier to understand, with visualisation and controls. You can change what you want to do with your traffic with the click of a button. We'll probably see more of this in the future. Companies in other sectors have other things to worry about then to rely on a dedicated networks team that can key all their parameters directly into command lines.
The words I use to describe our Transit service are ‘effortless optimal routing”
Vincent Bourgonjen
I feel at home with the NL-ix team, a nice mix of different types of people, and I think I’m useful because I have picked up a bit of knowledge about every aspect of the business. Nowadays, as a senior team member, I see myself more as an advisor - people are always welcome to come to me with questions or issues. And of course things like outside office group lunches are nice.
I like having grown our large network and set of services, it was quite a journey. It's fun building solutions, troubleshooting issues, assisting customers, managing systems and developing tools that make day-to-day life easier. I would say that this is a bit like what NL-ix is, a diverse network company. Compared to other businesses we try to do things differently. We are always tinkering and looking for improvements. I think our customers appreciate this.
