Network Consulting Services vs Hiring a Network Architect
A 6-month network project is being discussed internally. Core refresh, a new BGP edge, and the EVPN fabric in the data center that has been postponed for 3 years running. It needs a senior architect you do not have. Two ways to get one.
Hire. ITJobsWatch puts the UK median for a senior network engineer at £60,000, with the top 10% above £87,500. Glassdoor puts Germany near €76,500. That is engineer money. An architect who has designed and cut over a service provider core sits above that band. Add employer NI, pension and a 20 to 30% agency fee, and year 1 lands north of £100,000. Senior technical roles take 60 to 90 days to fill, and GDH reports close to 40% stay open past 90 days. The architect starts in month 3, the project ends in month 9, and you carry a permanent salary for a 6-month role.
Bring in professional services. A team of architects is on your network in weeks, scoped to this project and this timeline. They have already done the EVPN-VXLAN and MPLS designs, the vendor migrations, the BNG and vBNG integrations, the automation builds, across different vendors, different infrastructures and different operators. Your engineers do not have to stop running the network to learn a new technology first. They stay close to the work, so when something misbehaves at 2am after the cutover, they already know where to look. And when the project closes, the team hands over the HLD, the LLD and the runbooks, and your people pick it up from there.
Which side of that line did your last project sit on?
If you want to try the second option, ITcare runs Professional Network Services for ISPs, data center operators and hosting providers: architecture, migration, integration and automation, delivered by engineers who do this on service provider networks every week.
