 Back to theCUBE here, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks, Adam, in the studio. We've got two entrepreneurs here, co-founders of Last Mile Exchange, Andrew Hoskin and James Grant. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Joan, good to be here. Love to get the entrepreneur, because both co-founders make it happen. I mean, the pandemic was either a tailwind or a headwind for companies. And certainly, the internet didn't break. Everything worked out great. No, exactly. So, let's just jump in. Let's, before we get into some of the questions, what does LMX do? Who are you guys? Take a quick minute to explain what you guys do. Sure, so we're a software provider. We have a cloud-based SaaS platform, which effectively, it's a bit like a sky scanner or an Expedia for networks. Carriers need to buy and sell networks from each other, and we help them do that. And we have been in the cloud since day one, and so, it's what we do, why we're here, and it's a good place for us to tell you about it. I got to ask you, because one of the things being entrepreneurial, you got to read the tea leaves. One of the secrets of being a co-founder and doing anything entrepreneurial these days is, you got to see the future, but then you got to come back to the present and convince everybody what's going on. What is the core value proposition? What's the day in the life of a conversation? I'm going to, you're talking to Martians now, like, huh, what's the public cloud? It's like, is it like, isn't it just the internet? It's changing. What's the value proposition? What's the conversation like? So, the value proposition for us is that we work with our customers to sort of accelerate the sales cycle through cloud-based services. So, a lot of our customers are global tier one carriers who are looking to automate their connectivity pricing, and we do that for our cloud-based solutions. So, it is vital to us, and particularly with having customers all across the globe being able to sort of deploy cloud-based services makes life much easier. I got to ask you, one of the things that we love about cloud is the agility. Yeah. Okay, talk about the impact of what you guys are offering for the agility side. What's the impact of the consumer, the application developer? What's the impact? Cloud's had a big, big play for us, big impact for our customers. So, we provide our solution effectively almost a plug and play for them. So, we do quoting really, really well. You want to know where a network is, you want to know connectivity, we'll sort that out for you. And we can give you a solution that they can plug into their systems really quickly. In terms of for us, when we first started, we had servers in data centers and managing software on that, but we moved to Amazon pretty early. And what we now have is we can spin up a new customer environment in a day, which, you know, from previously two, three weeks. So, cloud has been transformational for us and hopefully for our customers as well. And you guys target mainly carriers? Very much so, yeah. We're very much in the big carrier telco space, the people that provide the fabric upon which all of this sits. Yeah, and then by the way, it's magic and it's robust. It's what we need, it's utilities, it's important. Last mile, obviously as we all, some people look at it and say, go back decades, broadband, you know, last mile was always that last nut to crack. Five G's here. The mobile sector is looking at massive growth. You're starting to see the cloud providers recognize that the edge is just another network connection. Yeah, absolutely. How do you guys see that evolving? What's going on? How do you see that affecting your business, the customers on the market? Well, so network, I mean, access is all about getting onto the network, whether you're talking cloud or whatever. So if you can't get onto the network, cloud is nothing. If you can't sort of backhaul your 5G, you're stuck. So what we're seeing is even with 5G, as it rolls out, as people look to densify their networks, they still need to get all that voice traffic, all that data traffic onto Fiber. So we're seeing a lot of interest there still in knowing where connectivity options are, knowing where the network is. But James also, I mean, that other aspect of access 10 years ago was all about Fiber, but you were just telling me before about how increasingly carriers are using 5G as effectively a router in a box, shipping it via DPD or FedEx out to a customer. Yeah, so typically we'll think about mobile as connecting a mobile phone, but now we're looking at sort of mobile connecting buildings. And one of the key challenges when you're connecting a building with mobile is what the actual connectivity within the building is. So often we will see mobile maps that show you the sort of connectivity at the sort of the outside level. But of course, you're actually going to have your infrastructure in the building so you need to know what the signal strength is there. So we're actually working with a partner at the moment so that we can identify within a building what the quality of the signal is. I mean, that's classic. If you think about like most people think of, oh, it just drops to the end point. And then you've got more network behind it, wireless, you got now to work at home, dynamics, IoT devices. So you guys have the buy, sell side of things going on. You've got the carriers buying and selling there. And then SD-WAN is a huge market that's growing as well. And all of that relies on access. Do you know what I mean? Like you can talk 5G, you can talk IoT. And of course, those are the exciting sexy things in the industry. But underpinning all of that is a network. And you mentioned the word before, and it's right, utility, you know, maybe it's not the sexy side of things, but you've got to have it. Otherwise nothing else works. You know, one of the things, we do a lot of cloud coverage over all the Amazon shows here coming at the telco, the telco digital revolution that's going on here. You can see it, and some people aren't ready for it. It's almost like it reminds me of the mainframe days back when I was growing up in college. It's like, oh, I'm not, I don't want to do the mainframe. I'm the new guy, I'm the young kid. I love this PC and mini computers. Here it's the same thing. It's kind of like, okay, I see the cloud, but when you have infrastructure as code, everything gets fuzzy. I mean, now you're talking about programmability. So that edge at the application level, some say it's going to be a massive innovation enabler, which is going to change that infrastructure as code, which means that guys like you guys are going to be able to provide programmable routes, programmable policy. Yeah, and APIs are, and the programmability of the network, the whole interplay from whether it's quoting, whether it's ordering, whether it's delivering services, whether it's kind of somebody going into somewhere and saying, I'd like 100 gig into this building, pressing a button and 15 minutes later, everything rolls together to turn it up, is where the whole industry's going. Let's take that for a second. Just a mind blowing scenario right there. Sounds simple. Compare where we were just 15 years ago. That scenario didn't exist, no, and it's hard. Yeah, it's not trivial, no, it's non-trivial. All right, so what's this mean for customers? Are they buying this level now? Like, where are they on the spectrum of buying and the progression of operationalizing their business to be fully robust network end to end visibility on workloads to network? I would say it sort of often depends where the customer is. So obviously we deal with global customers and that's one of our big selling points is that a lot of people are focusing on the US, the Western European market, the connectivity challenges that they're trying to solve there. Our customers have global customers who are looking for connectivity all throughout the world and often there'll be things like mining companies who don't have fiber going into them. So we need to be able to work with our customers and their suppliers to be able to automate everything because you can only fully quote a network when you've got all the locations back and if you're waiting for information coming back from Africa or from the former CIS then you're going to have a problem and we're working with companies in Africa and Russia, Kazakhstan at the moment to help them automate everything. You know, what's interesting, my mind just goes nuts here when thinking about what you guys do because as people start rolling their own with applications they're going to need to have this programmability like almost on demand. Yeah, they're going to need to have, I want to do a digital TV network. I want to provision something or something's hybrid or at the edge. You've got a football game or you've got something like this where you need capacity, you need it quickly, you need it for an event. Yeah, exactly. And 5G is perfect. I mean, how many times have we all been at a soccer game or a football game? It's like, I got bars but I have no backhaul. It's like, we all been there. Why, oh, there's 20,000 people. You sat right in the network and everyone's doing the same thing. The radio's working, the backhaul's choking. I mean, this isn't real, absolutely. How does 5G solve that? I mean, where does that get, how does that get solved? Is it going to be ubiquitous? Truly, 5G can make us all work better. I mean, certainly for the end user, 5G is, it provides speed, it provides capacity and also for the operators, it provides being able to get more people onto it. And so, and 5G is not my core strength but it absolutely will be transformative. What I can comment on is, like you say, for an event like this or the football or anything, the euros, it ultimately goes into a pipe. So you've got to make sure that you've got to have the right connectivity there and the right capacity there from the user's phone through the towers, all the way into the network, all the way to the data center and back again. So the edge, everything has to play together to do that and probably rolling that out quickly and making sure it's agile, making sure it's fast and make sure it's quick and reliable, that's what needs to all work together. I like how you said the expedia of the networks. Yeah. That, instantly in my mind says, okay, ease of use from consumption standpoint. What's the next level of growth for you guys? I'm also imagining it's programmability or cloudifying or amplifying it, making it. Yeah, certainly we are going to continue to push into, effectively, digital transformation in fact across telecoms is happening. You would think there would be a lot further ahead than it is. It's not. There are a lot of people still quoting, ordering manually. So we're very much part of that. But certainly the ordering and the provisioning, like we've mentioned, that's a big part for the industry and we're going to hopefully be part of that or we expect to be part of that. And making sure that connectivity is there when you need it. You know, I'm here, what's there, a bit like flights. I like to fly to New York. Who can do it, how much will it cost? I'll buy that one please. And that's what networks should be as well. James, what's your vision on how the customers are progressing in their mindset? Obviously you've got some blocking and tackling to do. You're in the market. Where are they going with the use case and the application? The customers are getting to the stage where they're expecting to be able to go into a portal and turn up services. So as with many things that we're seeing throughout life today, you can go into an app, you can press a couple of buttons and you can order something. So that's what they're expecting is to be able to just go and say, I need 100 meg here, press a few buttons and in 10 minutes time, the circuit's not only quoted but it's provisioned. At the moment there's a sort of a digital divide between those that have the digitization in place and those that don't. And that's sort of the key that we're trying to sort of help the industry with is the outliers and also the main carriers to make sure that it's not a sort of a digital haves and a digital have nots. I was just going to say that. So if you have the digital haves and have nots, is that a function of them just not being operationalizing their digitization or is it they not set up for or they don't have you guys? What's the have not side of it? How do they become the haves? Well one of the biggest challenges is actually around the sort of identifying the connectivity at a particular location. So in some countries it's very easy to do like the US, UK, Netherlands, we have nice sort of standard address formatting and you can identify a building at roof level and when it comes to turning up connectivity straightaway you want to make sure that you turn up the connectivity to the right building. And that's one of the challenges that we're seeing throughout sort of some of the Eastern European and sort of the Latin, the Asian and the African markets. I mean we saw what happened with Amazon instances. You got spot instances, you got reserve instances. You're starting to see that mindset. That's a SaaS mindset. That's kind of where things are going. Is that, do you guys see the same thing here or is it different? Yeah, well certainly at the enterprise space they tend to make decisions over longer scale. So that maybe not so much that you sign contracts in a year's term, et cetera. But yeah, certainly as a provider, a SaaS provider using all those things, the ability to tune your expenses, tune your costs, even your resource, you know, turning up servers by the hour, by the minute is a big thing. And it takes a mindset change for us and our customers. You don't mind if you don't mind me asking how long have you guys been doing this business as co-founders? When did it start? What was the guiding principle? How do you guys look back now? And James and I met working for Verizon many years ago. You might have heard of them. And we sort of did what we do now in as much as James around the commercial side of things, I around the software side of things. And we saw that connectivity was a universal problem. And so we saw an opportunity, we went out, we started Last Mile Exchange. We pivoted once or twice, still in the same space, but we eventually realized that where we are now was what the industry needed. And that's where we've been pushing now for quite a few years. I want to give you guys a lot of credit and a lot of props, congratulations. I think, you know, the digital divide has been a broadband challenge for many, many years and decades. Now you got that urban divide where people don't have access. And I heard stories during the pandemic that people had access in the region but couldn't get it to the home, affordability, access devices, these are new issues. The digital divide, they have connectivity options. It's not really clear yet. So you're starting to see a lot more of that going on. Of course the rural areas. I live out in the countryside on the farm. So I'm quite used to the challenges of connectivity. Now, when I first moved into my house, I ended up having to get two-way satellite broadband and things have improved now. But when we're talking about 5G, people in London, they have 5G. 5G is something that I'm not going to see for three, four years probably. Globally it'll democratize access because like we were saying, we're seeing it in enterprise, you can send out a router or a router with a SIM card in it. I mean, you can give a kid a mobile phone in the middle of, you know, Kenya and he can have access to the world through the internet. So, you know, that increased capacity, that increased, you know, densification of networks. Okay, they're not all going to be on 5G today. James hasn't got 5G and he only lives 30 minutes out of London. But, you know, 3G, 4G, I think the gentleman on one of the keynotes was talking there about 3G Plus. You know, effectively that's going to roll out. The 5G is going to be in New York's in London, but it's going to make a difference. It's going to be bring your own G to your house soon. And I think the space ops is going to be great. Yeah. And I think overall, just overall, the challenges on the topologies, you're going to start to see diversity in the network topology and it's just going to explode. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be super exciting. Well, again, I think you guys are under something big. I think this idea of satisfying, making things programmable, the infrastructure as code is going to be pretty big. So thanks for coming on. And what's your take real quick of Cloud City? It's been great. We've just walked in, we've both said as we came in yesterday to set up and we're really blown away and the rest of our team arrived today and they were very impressed as well. And I was going to say TelcoDR on the team have done a really impressive job here. I think you have to come here and see it to believe it because when we walked in it was just like, this place is stunning. Awesome. What's the cube coverage? We're rocking and rolling here. We're going back to the studio to see Adam and the team. Back to you.