 the newsroom for telecom professionals, and JSA radio, the voice for tech and telecom on iHeart radio. I'm Jamie Scott of the TIA joining me here today is my friend, Mr. Simon Lee. He's the director of St. Terrace, as well as the managing director of Sapiens Capital Partners. Simon, thanks for joining us. Good morning, Jamie. I really love taking off the new year speaking with you, so I really appreciate your time, Simon. I see you and as many do as an industry thought leader, a visionary. And so I love getting a sense from you to kick it off 2017 of what you see is coming in the world of technology. So what do you see as the necessary infrastructure that we need to support IoT? Well, this notion of software defined is coming. And we've been seeing that in the communication space. And certainly all of the technologies around IoT have been under development for quite a while, and they are starting to happen. So the standards are being set. The hardware is becoming available. The communication systems to support it are becoming available. And there's no question that everything that frankly uses electricity ultimately will likely have an IP address. And the result of that means that the ability, the requirement, frankly, to be able to communicate and control securely to those devices is going to be incredibly important. So from an infrastructure standpoint, edge development is incredibly important. We have to be able to reach those devices. That might mean Wi-Fi. It might mean new standards like Alora or SIGFOX in order to reach everything from a home, a plant, or a connected or autonomous vehicle. All those things are required. But a couple of things that we just mentioned, security is incredibly important. Nobody needs their car hacked because that's a potentially life-threatening issue. Nobody wants a physical plant hacked in any way. And people are scared of having their cameras like we're using now infiltrated by someone in Sidious. So security is incredibly important. And that will also require greater knowledge of the network, not just from a security standpoint, but also from a performance standpoint because these devices need to be online at all times. And even though some of them can probably deal with a lapse or two, at the end of the day, there are mission critical activities, certainly for an enterprise, or if we're talking about an autonomous vehicle, where maintaining that connection is mission critical. Talking mission critical, what do you see as the trends right in the data center space as we ramp up to accommodate all this data? You know, some of the things that have been happening the last few years will continue. And what I mean by that is that some of the big will continue to get bigger. That means that these large-scale developments for hyperscale computing aren't going to turn around anytime soon. So the largest of the large will continue to build bigger and bigger. And yet at the same time, distribution will be incredibly important. So larger campuses near major metros will likely be a continuing trend, especially where power is relatively inexpensive and there are high populations. As an example, ideally you can find that intersection. But edge data centers are here. There have been a number of companies that have been very successful in doing that. As a new business model, there are incumbents like the equinexes of the world that have refocused on their edge. And even this notion of having somewhat containerized data centers even further at the edge will take root. It's a matter of time and perhaps those business models haven't been worked out. But I fully anticipate that that will continue to happen because we just need compute and resources and that data closer and closer to where people are. Yes, that old real estate mantra, right? Location, location, location. Same is true. So putting your crystal glass ball on the display here, what do you see as the predictions for the new year, for 2017 moving forward? It's interesting. You know, the beginning of the year in particular is interesting because announcements come out. So recently a CES is an example. We heard AT&T, you know, certainly a large telecommunications company announced Indigo, which is their software-defined effort. And there are other large carriers that are starting to partner with software-defined companies because they find it faster. Perhaps there are additional services that they didn't develop themselves. So it's what was sort of the land startups is starting to migrate into the land of the established. So I very much see enterprises increasingly having access to companies that they've worked with, not just emerging companies anymore, but their established providers implement models which allow them a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they provision, purchase, and use telecom services. But that will also increasingly penetrate into how systems are managed and run. So the cloud has been a big story the last few years. We've all kind of maybe exhaustively talked about it, but implementing these software-defined architectures into the cloud such that your compute resources, your storage resources, all the things that you need to run an enterprise are very easily, flexibly, reliably accessible. And that is a trend that's been happening, but I think, you know, technology never moves in parallel everywhere. Certain things advance. We had the cloud advance and then we had the communication systems that had to kind of catch up to support it. Well, that is starting to happen. And now we have IoT and other things come along which are increasingly going to push sort of the technical boundaries out even further. But I do see IoT adoption happening. I see a lot of activity in the autonomous and connected vehicle space. Some of these trials that companies like Tesla have made where they run cars, you know, fully autonomous from like up, you know, from California to Seattle as an example have happened already. BMW has an effort where they're going to deliver some percentage of, you know, autonomous vehicles through their Reach Now program. A lot of major companies, including our domestic car manufacturers, are spending a ton of time, effort and energy into these programs. So I don't know that we're going to see a ton of these vehicles on the road, but these tests, what we are going to see is that the application for cars is going to lead the test bed and start to become commercialized. We're talking about driverless cars and SCN coming at us quickly. Can you tell us how we're getting there? It all seems so science fiction and a little scary, especially in terms of security and how we're going to prioritize all this data for really critical life-threatening decisions, like stopping a car before a crash. Yeah, that's a very good point. And it was science fiction, not that long ago, but the good news is that a lot of advancements have been made more recently in things like machine learning and artificial intelligence that are really helping us. And it's not just about cars. It's about how do you, in a universe where there are going to be billions and billions of devices, and there are going to be many of which are going to control things that are that are mission critical. How do we set priorities? How do we make sure that the key functions occur? And how do we make sure that application thresholds are maintained? And it's not going to be human-controlled. It is going to be via machine learning. So the network has to become more intelligent, has to become more aware. And we've been talking about this awareness for a long time, but in the past it was only a QoS discussion. Now it has to be a security discussion. Now it has to be a prioritization by application or even sub-application, such that the machines, the cars, whatever they may be that need the data can access the data or be able to communicate effectively. So fortunately we're seeing lots and lots of advances out of the likes of IBM, Watson, out of the Amazons of the world and Google. And we're even seeing it applied in the home as a lot of people now have these Amazon Echoes and the Google Home, which are fairly intelligent devices that will only learn more and more as they live with you. So that's the good news. We do see lots of advancements that are bringing science fiction into reality, and the application of these are no longer something for movies. We're seeing them applied in our world today. Certainly a brave new world. Thank you my friend for joining us here and being so gracious with your time and predictions and insights. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA Radio and JSA TV.