Albany, NY – June 11, 2019 – FirstLight, a leading provider of fiber-optic data, Internet, data center, cloud, and voice services to enterprise and carrier customers throughout the Northeast,  announced today that Champlain Cable has selected FirstLight to upgrade its high-speed fiber Internet service and provide cloud solutions.

Champlain Cable is a manufacturer of high-performance insulated wire for automotive, commercial vehicle, Navy shipboard, industrial, and marine oil and gas markets. With manufacturing plants in Colchester, VT, and two facilities in El Paso, TX, operations rely heavily on the ability to efficiently communicate, place orders, and track inventory on a reliable, low-latency fiber network.

“Many of our users work remotely and depend on fast, reliable VPN connections,” said Bob Bolduc, IT and Network Manager for Champlain Cable. “It’s the lifeline to their customer base, our manufacturing facilities, and their home office. Uptime is absolutely critical for us. We also use a fair amount of bandwidth to share engineering drawings and photos that help clarify certain product specifications, so we need high availability.”

Champlain Cable has had a longstanding relationship with FirstLight, first with voice services and then Internet, having recently upgraded from a 50 megabit-per-second (Mbps) connection to a 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connection. Champlain’s latest venture with FirstLight was to implement Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. Bolduc says that not having to purchase new servers and SANs every three years will save the company money and allow for fast, flexible deployments as they acquire new businesses.

He also adds that having the data in a secure data center more than 200 miles away makes for a good business continuity plan. Leveraging the VMWare products allows for servers to be migrated to different data centers when natural or manmade disasters happen.

FirstLight offers backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and cloud computing, along with colocation and data center services at 12 data centers located throughout the Northeast.  

FirstLight has focused on the manufacturing sector as one of its increasingly important verticals. FirstLight’s growing low-latency network, affordable and scalable cloud solutions, and specialized service offerings appeal to enterprise and SMB manufacturers who depend on technology and connectivity more than ever in modernizing their manufacturing processes.

“Backing up our data in the cloud is a natural evolution for us,” continued Bolduc. “The business landscape has changed, and our customers expect us to partner with them to help anticipate and alleviate challenges as though we were part of their team. The only way to do that is to ensure that we are always connected and that our data as well as our customers’ data are secure and accessible. As we grow as an organization and as our customer base expands geographically, we need a way to ensure that data is secure and always at our fingertips.”

“Manufacturers like Champlain Cable appreciate the importance of having a technology platform that supports their business initiatives and allows for constant communications with their customers in order to exceed their clients’ expectations,” said Matt Jancovic, FirstLight Chief Revenue Officer. “Having fast, dependable, fiber connectivity is key to achieving this goal.”