 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Kutaya of JSA. Joining me here at ITW 2017 in Chicago, my friend, Mr. Simon Lee, he is the managing director of Sapien's Capital and I have to say it is always a pleasure to have you here on JSA TV, Simon. Likewise, Jamie. Always good to see you. What I love about Simon is that he really has an industry perspective from the ground up. He has his wonderful work in the data center space all the way up to the network infrastructure level on up through the application. So let's start at the bottom here, the data center level. What do you see trends impacting? Well, density is finally happening. We've been talking about the mythical sort of HPC and dense applications coming to the data center and a number of people have been anticipating for a long time but it hasn't really happened when you check the data. However, what's interesting now is that I think people are finally starting from a hardware standpoint and application level running enough parallelism that density is occurring. So we're seeing things in life sciences, we're seeing things in gaming, in AI and machine learning where essentially crunching, you know, trying to reduce the dollar per cycle down to a level where you can do more and more processing. So the result of that is that people are starting to take that into the box and into the data center. So what's amazing is that it's no longer strange to see a 15, 20 kilowatt per rack deployment even up to 50, 52 is starting to happen. And I know there are folks that have always prognosticated that you'd see 100 kilowatts. We're not quite there yet, perhaps there are some. But from a commercial deployment standpoint, it is starting to happen. So there are some facilities like Sinteris that are built for high density and I'm sure over time additional providers are going to continue to do so because the customers are finally starting to demand it. 50 kilowatts, that's just insane blowing the mind and you know, you can see 100 coming quite soon due to all of the new technologies and applications which we'll get to in a minute driving that. But let's first move up one more level, the network infrastructure level. What do you see happening there? We've talked a bit about software defined and I think that there's no question that from an architecture level that's starting to take root. Even at ITW there have been some announcements about SD, WAN partnerships. There's been a Cisco acquisition recently of the Ptela. So you can see that the maturity is starting to occur. And even beyond the maturity there are other companies that are taking it to an additional level like Neutrolix which applies an artificial intelligence framework around an SD architecture. And so there's more and more learning about everything and there's more and more flexibility and fluidity because the reality is that even today as you see networks putting more and more glass into the ground they're doing so but that's a 10-year investment horizon. The question is how do you flexibly cost-effectively deliver scalable services over that and that requires an SD framework. Yeah, SD WAN, SDN, those are the themes for sure here at ITW and just in our community in general. So moving up to the end user, the application level, what's driving all this? That's just more compute power. We've been talking about big data for a long time and while I think it's still important the phrase of that is probably used a little bit less because we've shifted to AI and machine learning and to a certain extent it's kind of an evolution of the same issue which is we have all this data, what are we going to do with it? And you can't have a person sit there and look at all of them and try and seek out patterns. You need machines to do it. And so whether it's in finance, whether it's in life sciences, genomics research, some of the other things that we've talked about is applying a machine learning framework to smart cities. How do you control and learn about your environment? How do you develop a situational awareness about things that are happening around you by deploying more sensors and being able to read and interpret data so that it's actionable and improves people's lives? These are the types of things that are starting to take over which lends itself to a different computational problem which is why we're seeing demand for infrastructure for bandwidth for compute all escalate. So much data. How do we make it useful? Certainly a great question for the year ahead and beyond. What do you see yourself doing in the next year? Well infrastructure has always been a big part of what I do. And that will certainly continue. But there's a renewed focus on the types of applications that are demanding this type of infrastructure. So we hear about AI and machine learning a lot. And certainly all the big companies are well tuned to that. But there are new things happening where we are learning so much about our environment that I do believe there are going to be quite a number of fresh new companies that are going to blossom that are going to change the way we think about the world. So that's some of the stuff that excites me. I really do feel like we are standing at the edge of something transformative for the human race. And Simon talking to you is always enlightening. I really appreciate your time and feedback and insight. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.