 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scadokataya of JSA here at ITW 2019 in Atlanta, joined by my friend, long time friend, Raul Martinek, CEO of Data Bank and of course an industry thought leader. We're excited to have you once again on JSA TV. Thank you for joining us Raul. Thank you very much for having me. Oh, it's our pleasure and okay, Data Bank success story. You guys have been focused on regional data center concentration in key markets. Tell us a little bit more there. Sure, Data Bank's focus is on secondary markets. You know, companies started in Dallas but when it expanded it decided to go to markets like Minneapolis and Kansas City and Salt Lake. Those are markets that we think are underserved compared to the tier one markets and our strategy there is very simple. It's to go into these markets and build what we believe is the best high quality facility and have multiple facilities in the same market. So that way when the enterprises start to outsource or cloud and content players look for a location in that market, we have the best facility and we've been doing that successfully from the original three Data Bank markets and today we're in nine markets with 19 data centers. Congratulations. Thank you. We're loving the headlines that are coming from Data Bank for sure and the strategy is getting this data closer to the end user and the edge. We hear that word a lot. What does it mean to Data Bank? Sure. The edge is obviously one of the more popular topics these days and it's a real development. We kind of see it a little differently than some players in the space. That focus that I mentioned around secondary markets, second tier NFL markets we think that's kind of where the edge is starting to appear today. When we look across our platform we see those types of deployments happening in cloud and content players in those markets. They started initially as being more network nodes for kind of transit capacity but now we're also seeing some production workloads happen in those markets. So we think that's the next phase of the edge is that the large cloud and content and the long tail of kind of SaaS companies and other cloud and content companies will start to service end users out of more than just a small handful of locations like they do today. Yeah. Absolutely. And you mentioned a couple of those key markets that you're in. Can you give us a little bit more of your current markets and maybe even where you might be heading? Sure. So today, as I mentioned, we're in nine markets. Dallas, Kansas City, Minneapolis, our farthest west market is Salt Lake and then on the eastern market we're in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore and most recently Atlanta. We announced a deal earlier this year where our next market is in Indianapolis. It's an acquisition of a company called Light Bound. We're waiting on team telecom and FCC approval, which we think is going to happen probably in the next 60 days. So if we expand into other markets, we'll probably have that same type of characteristics that there'll be quote-unquote NFL cities, but with population centers of around, you know, two to three million, we think that's a real good sweet spot for edge markets and for data bank strategy. Yeah, love that. So in Indianapolis, get ready. Here we come and any key NFL city. This man's on a tier here. So tell us a little bit changing topics here. There's an outsourcing trend that's been happening lately by data centers in large corporations and enterprises. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Absolutely. Yeah, that's a really interesting trend and, you know, we think that that still has a long ways to go. I mean, the data we see looks like around 60 to 70 percent of IT infrastructure is still controlled by large enterprises in facilities that they own and manage and that over the next, you know, five to ten years, that's going to shrink to a very small number. I'll give you a perfect example. In Pittsburgh, we just acquired our second data center. It was through a sale leaseback of PNC Bank. And PNC Bank, you know, sixth largest commercial bank in the country, they had consolidated their footprint to three owned data center locations, had outsourced two of them, one to Ashburn and one to Southern Virginia. And they now had this last facility that they owned and operated and they didn't want to manage that infrastructure. So we acquired the facility and they became a tenant of ours and now we're developing that property into a multi-tenant data center. And again, the Pittsburgh is a perfect example where we don't really see a lot of high quality inventory in that market and we think with the move that we made with the PNC data center, we're going to give those corporate enterprises an option to now come out of their facility into a high quality multi-tenant data center. So that dynamic, you know, we see it across our platform in these secondary markets. I love that story. Great news also for those Pittsburgh businesses as well. Data Bank, of course, focused on high performance computing in particular when it comes to educational institutions. Our friends over at Georgia Tech, good example. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing there. And again, Pittsburgh, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so on that front, as you just mentioned, you know, we just commissioned a facility here in Atlanta. It's an eight megawatt, 90,000 square foot facility purpose built. And Georgia Tech's our anchor customer there on a multi-megawatt type of load. And the main reason for that is their high performance computing initiatives. You know, across major research universities, you know, there's a lot of emphasis around what's called computational research. In other words, doing fundamental research using computer models. And to do that, you need a lot of horsepower from a computing perspective and also a lot of storage. So data center capacity now becomes a critical element to being able to expand that. And Georgia Tech, you know, being one of the leading universities on this computational research, they obviously had this great vision around, you know, creating this technology ecosystem called CODA, Technology Square, where it's not just a data center, but a 650,000 square foot office tower where they're putting in a couple thousand of their technical people and other organizations are leasing space there. So that's an area that we think is going to grow in the years to come as more and more universities adopt this computational research initiatives that are going to require high performance computing and more data center capacity. Yeah, I just love those guys at Georgia Tech. They really are on the cutting edge. And educational institutions are paying attention and following suit. So it's certainly a trend we're going to see more and more of. Talking another trend, 5G, big buzzword. Hear it every day, all day long, especially here at ITW. How are we discussing 5G with data centers? What's the correlation there? What are you guys doing? Sure, that's a great, great, another great technology trend along with the edge. And, you know, data bank, as you know, we're part of this constellation of companies that is owned by Digital Bridge. And some of our sister companies are tower businesses and small cell businesses and now most recently the acquisition of Xeo, which is exciting. So what the reason I mentioned that is because, you know, we're able to kind of share some data points around how all those players are interacting with the 5G ecosystem in the wireless carriers. So we absolutely believe 5G is something that, you know, it's going to start to accelerate towards the end of this year and really start to gain momentum in 2020. You know, it's really a fiber-fed type of initiative. So that means obviously it's going to create a lot more bandwidth and create, you know, new use cases for compute and storage. So we're very bullish on it. We think it's going to take a little time. And again, we think that data bank with its particular geographic footprint is well positioned to assist these carriers in rolling out this, you know, this new network that's going to unleash a lot of innovation and new technologies. Yeah, Digital Bridge just love those guys as well and their focus on our industry, on the wireless, on the data centers, on the fiber. Unbelievable what they're doing from an investment perspective for our industry and, of course, data bank being one of their earliest investments, which actually speaks volumes to them and you. Thank you. So, okay, last question and then I'll let you go. But where can we see data bank going in the next year? Well, look, I think, you know, we're going to continue to build organically. You know, we have a very, very, you know, deep organic build project. We built four new data centers last year. I think we're going to continue to do that. And then we'll continue to stay active from an M&A perspective if we see attractive targets that fit the profile that I described in terms of, you know, great businesses in great markets that are not tier one. So, we'll see. I think you'll see exciting things from data bank in the future. Definitely on a growth story right there, data bank. Where can our viewers go to find out more? That's databank.com. Pretty simple. Databank.com. It's right here, guys. Check it out. Thank you so much, Raul, for joining us again here on JSA TV. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV at ITW. Happy networking.