18 January 2022

The new DE-CIX self-service portal

Back in July, we launched our new portal for customers and partners and, since then, our team has worked hard to improve how you can manage your interconnection services and on bringing new services onto the portal. Last week, we deactivated the legacy portal, and the new self-service portal is now the place to go to manage your interconnection services and to find related information.

We spoke to Dr Thomas King, CTO of DE-CIX, about the self-service portal and what is planned for it in the future.

What was the motivation behind the self-service portal?

We wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to order, configure, and cancel Interconnection services. The new self-service portal is where we step into the fully automated provisioning and configuring of interconnection services.

What is currently possible on the portal?

Customers can now order new or change existing interconnection services whenever they need, and these changes are done instantly. The provisioning and configuration process is automated so you can use the portal when convenient for you – fast, easy to use, without complex paperwork, emails, or calls.

For the time being, customers can order, configure, or change peering services (GlobePEER and GlobePEER Remote), cloud services (DirectCLOUD for MS Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM), private interconnects (VirtualPNI) as well as order new access ports

The portal also has a chat function allowing you to chat instantly with our Customer Service if you have any questions.

The portal is in beta; why?

The new portal is in the beta phase because we are working heavily on improving it further by adding and enhancing features. Nevertheless, everything you order or change is done instantly and in production – it is not a test scenario! We want to allow our customers and partners to work with the portal and get feedback on how to improve it further, based on their concrete suggestions and requests.

So, if you are using the portal and have any questions or want to give us feedback, utilize the chat functionality in the portal or contact us on the usual communication channels. 

What is planned next for the portal?

The statistics graph and monitoring reports currently provided in the self-service portal already cover basic use cases. However, we see that customers are interested in more advanced graphs and reports. So, we are currently working on implementing what our customers are asking for – expect this to go live in the near future.

If you are not an existing DE-CIX customer, can you still order through the portal?

Our existing customers and partners can log in to the new portal with their existing customer portal log-in credentials. And once you become a customer, you get access to the self-service portal.

The portal roadmap includes plans to allow new customers to directly order services through the self-service portal – fast and easy to use, without complex paperwork, emails, or calls.

Check out the new DE-CIX portal at https://portal.de-cix.net/login; You can log in with your existing customer portal log-in credentials. Here is a short video explaining the log-in process.