 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan coming to you from ITW 2020. Joining me today is Chris Bailey chief commercial officer at Aqua Coms. Chris welcome to JSA TV. Well welcome Adiv. Thank you and the warm welcome. Chris for those who don't know please tell our viewers about Aqua Coms. Well Aqua Coms is a an independent carry-neutral provider of subsea capacity services. We operate currently in the Atlantic market and our services include 10 gig and 100 gig lit services as well as spectrum and fiber pair sales. We operate AEC1 today America Europe Connect one and that's been in operation for about four years now and that's our core current cable across the the Atlantic. We also operate a cable called CC1 which is a crossing across the Irish sea so connecting Ireland to the UK and the two of those cables then gives us connectivity from New York to Ireland to Dublin as a core city particularly with some of the hyperscalers and then on with connectivity over CC1 to the UK to London. We are headquartered in Dublin in Ireland. We operate quite diversely there was a team and we actually operate with about 20 people in our team that might not seem like a lot but we manage our business through having an experienced team of 20 managers who operate and lead the functions that we mostly therefore outsource. So a good example of that would be we have a managed outsource opportunity with our knock so we determine the rules and the principles and operations of how they work but the team itself is an outsourced function actually based in the US so that way it keeps us nimble agile keep our overhead costs linked to how we operate and you know on a sort of pay-as-you-go and therefore keeps us very much you know as a nimble organization. With regards to our brand as Aquacoms our key strap line is Focus which plays a play on words with fiber optic cables under the sea and it's very clear that that's all that we do. We focus on subsea cables and we don't look to operate threshold networks therefore we really do focus that as our specialist area. 2020 is a huge year for Aquacoms completing three subsea cable systems you mentioned just a few of them a few seconds ago America Europe connect Celtics connect North Sea connect so can you share any updates I know that you're talking about that the progress of those you recently just addressed that but to dig deeper how will those cable systems impact the much anticipated North Atlantic loop. So yes so the construction of the North Atlantic loop we have we have our existing AEC1 and CC1 today we are near completion on our second transatlantic cable which is AEC2 there's about a hundred kilometers of cable lay still required just north of Scotland to finish the trunk of the cable and so we're expecting that to be completed in the late summer this year. We are building two other cables one is North Sea Connect as you mentioned connecting from Denmark over to the UK and then we're also building a second cable across the Irish Sea so a second cable connecting Ireland in the UK a CC2 both of those new cables will be finished in Q4 this year the combination then of those two transatlantic cables they're two diverse cables both coming through to northern Europe with then regional cables to connect them back that creates this loop to provide diversity and resilience across some very well-secured networks connecting really the key data center hubs of that part of Europe so Ireland as I mentioned where many of the hyperscalers already located and increasingly so into the into Scandinavia into the Nordics where our cable lands into Denmark for the new transatlantic cable as well as therefore the North Sea Connect coming back towards the UK again Denmark Sweden and additionally now coming into play Norway very strong in their data center capabilities with a lot of renewable energy available there to support that industry so that's the development of it it should support therefore with the loop to give diverse routing options for everybody with new modern cable systems well and just in time for itw I understand you have even more growth news this time within the aquacombs team so can you tell us more about that Chris sure we've we've recently brought on three new individuals to the team a new vice president of sales Nick Barton we have a new head of solution engineering Niall O'Connor and a third member of the new team running our project management office called Andy Wordley the the interesting part of all of that is we have done all of the hiring including interviewing and onboarding during the current pandemic and whilst we will know some of the individuals before they during this whole process they have not actually met anybody in the company as an aquacombs employee they've been fully onboarded fully up to speed and working full speed right now despite the fact that they've never been to our office or met any of the team so so yeah so growth in the team but in certainly very different circumstances to normal great synergy in a virtual environment so that's great great news Chris so where can we learn more about aquacombs and follow the developments of the completion of those subsea cable systems we obviously have our website at aquacombs.com we are also quite visible during itw so we have participation at itw including some media coverage but also very much with virtual meetings to be to be held so please do get in contact look on to the delegate list and please reach out to us. You heard from Chris go check out aquacombs thank you Chris for joining us today and spending time with us. Well you're very welcome and thank you very much indeed for the opportunity. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast happy networking.