Bridgepointe’s Business Evolution

CF: How has Bridgepointe evolved over the years? How has its business model changed?

SE: It started with me and Brian sitting back-to-back in a really small room with our analog phones from home. Slowly, over a period of time, we created a model where people came and worked under us. Similar to today, we went out with them and helped them monetize their relationships. Obviously, over time we’ve gone from selling data center and switched long distance and frame relay to MPLS, more data center and bigger IP pipes, if you will. Now we’ve obviously evolved with the times, still continuing to sell a lot of data center, a lot of IP and have moved to the cloud.

The big boon for us was when we started bringing people on. Growing the business, building out our team, and then bringing on more customer-facing sales talent, starting with our first engineer, Mike Pereira, about eight years ago. We’ve been bringing on more and more engineers over time to help us not only evaluate what customers need and fulfill those needs for them, but also figuring out what technologies we should bring into the portfolio to help our strategists sell more. When we started 20 years ago, we didn’t realize that the cloud was going to come our way and fit our model perfectly. For all of us that’s been a big boon. We’ve got the people, the process and the technology to help our customers make those decisions.