Interview: Vincentas Grinius – Heficed, Founder & CEO

Heficed changes the way companies and government organizations order, lease, deploy, and manage IP addresses. The platform automates a time-consuming manual process for organizations with a need to deploy a large volume and wide variety of IP addresses, speeding up the process and lowering the costs associated with provisioning IPs to physical and virtual infrastructure. We’ve talked with Vicentas Grinius, CEO of Heficed about the company history, the IP Address Market, and the hosting industry.

Hello Vincentas, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us about the story of Heficed? What were the most important milestones for you?

We started our business in 2008, we actually started the business when it was an economical crisis. And me and Andrius, we actually had good timing for moving to the IP world and begin something new. We actually launched Host1Plus in 2008 as a shared hosting provider. Later we involved in cloud services and we developed an idea to develop a sort of network engineering and IP management platform. And last year we actually rebranded ourselves to Heficed and introduced the IP Address Market, which is designed for dedicated B2B.

Our aim and our goal are to help the businesses to IP shortage and once we have large IP locations to monetize. Because most of the time when IPs are out, we felt a huge IP shortage before what could be the solution for the IP holders to share via and use their sources. An out of 4.3 billion IP addresses there are still 822 million be precise IP addresses whether it was announced but allocated to the actual devices. So we came up with the idea to introduce our IP Address Market where the actual enterprises hold large locations or even small locations would list those IP addresses into the IP Address Market and we help of others we scale their businesses and have the problem with scheming their businesses off the IP shortage.

So, that gives the opportunity for the guys who actually scaling their business not to dedicate so much of funding to maintain their growth. Ss an example if you need 10.000 IP addresses at the current IP market price, you need to pay around  $20 or even more. Our idea is to support Ips instead of buying the IP addresses of those 10.000 IP addresses you need $200.000 instead of that to make much more investment particular on the IP addresses. And the main goal – the answer to the question – is to become a market leader. And introduce the IP lease as a standard in the actual market.

Which industries can have the benefits of Heficed solutions? Who is your target audience?

We’ve done about the research of our customer base recently. And we have estimated there are 75 IT verticals are covered by our solutions. This could be a hosting industry, cybersecurity, business intelligence, telcos, ISPs, cloud providers even hyper scalers, and so on and so forth. I mean you can even touch non-IT sectors, for example, the automotive industry or even the hospitality industry can get benefit the solution we provide.

We also see that you’ve published a post on Twitter that you are offering your services free of charge because of the COVID-19 pandemic. How did the industry react to your offer, what are the benefits of using your free services?

We all need to stand united to fight this pandemic crisis. We are not as big as Amazon or Google, but what we offer, what we give was very positive from the market perspectives the companies which actually doing research on COVID-19. Helping the others in the related issues.

Because of  COVID-19, most of the people are staying at home. Internet usage is getting high, and due to this high usage, some of the video streaming platforms already decreased the video quality to standard definition. The people also doing more e-shopping. At this point Heficed solutions come up, what do you offer due to this higher Internet usage and how do your services help? What are your suggestions?

First of all, you know, what we see so far, what we can spot that the Internet is not designed for such a load as big as we have the current loads. And I think that we still need to keep up on Internet penetration. Even if you will see that in Europe we have like 90% of Internet penetration. But the issue is that we are still not enough. I would say that first of all we need to think about how we could optimize each of the network processes.

Even what we see for example, on the websites lots of things can be optimized, meaning that even reducing the size of a website. From 2 MB to 1 MB would be a big impact., knowing how many websites we have over the place. So I think it’s all about optimization, it’s all about scaling and it’s all about penetration.

Are there any plans to build new solutions? We already know that you are adding new locations for your services. What about new services, new products?

This year we have our roadmap and we already plan to actually focus more on the IP distribution, meaning that we’re going to introduce the feature that will allow businesses to use the IP addresses with our IP Address Market on their network which is essentially important for Telcos and ISPs in terms of the actual infrastructure so we are constantly improving our network and we’re trying to monitor as close as possible, the costliest IP transit providers to connect them into our infrastructure. So this will allow better latency, better performance, and many other things.

You know the network is probably the primary thing for everything else. In terms of bare metal and cloud, we are going to introduce much more automation inside of their services, a lot of is going to be backend focused. Our customers will not be going to see much improvement in terms of a new feature but they are going to see a big improvement in the provisioning and latency performance.

You’ve already mentioned that it is very important to optimize and scalability is very important nowadays. But I will ask you today keeping the uptime on high levels, the management, the maintenance, also the security is getting more important. Do you have any additional recommendations for our readers regarding those topics?

Security is the most important thing but we have actually many examples when companies think about security too late. We have already written a couple of blog posts analyzing the situation when focusing on the new services, on new features, introducing some additional occasions whatever, would not wave the security issues. That means we need to focus on security especially when you have a huge amount of users even during the pandemic crisis, the security issues actually an increased trust skill.  My recommendation is definitely not to put aside the security things that you think needed to be addressed.

Thank you for the interview. It was very nice to talk with you. We are so happy to know much more about your solutions. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much, Atalay. It was a pleasure.