 Welcome, everybody, to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. We're recovering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Jamie Scottokutaya, CEO of JSA. Today, we are sitting down with Jim Madison, the CEO of LightEdge, to discuss all the exciting new buzz around the company and its recent announcements. Welcome, Jim. Hi, Jamie, thank you. We're so thrilled to have you here. Let's go ahead and just dive right in. There's so much news coming out of LightEdge with the launch of your revamped cloud solution, which is described as your most powerful cloud offering to date. Can you fill us in on this new solution and what it means for LightEdge customers? You bet, I'd be happy to. Thank you. Yes, the LightEdge cloud is kind of our enterprise class cloud solution. We are constantly enhancing not only the features and capabilities of the platform, but also the operational side of it as well. So it's a continuous enhancement. In this particular case, the benefits of our advancements from a development standpoint would provide the customer with operational benefits of kind of faster cloud, with less complexity, and ultimately, as everybody wants, less cost. And those clients typically choose historically and still even more so today, LightEdge, because of our kind of security advancements and our uptime, which, by taking care of that for our clients, it kind of allows them to extend their teams to focus on some of the things that they would want to focus on around performance and vulnerabilities. From a technical standpoint, for those people that are more technical oriented, a couple of the things that we did from an improvement standpoint was focused around improving the user experience of the multi-cloud management through our enhanced and integrated VMware Cloud Director. It included advancements with the NSX-T technologies, which allow customers to further micro segmentation of their business platform. Next-gen firewalls, built-in DDoS, and global server management. So those would be some of the advancements that were included in this deployment. Incredible. That really sounds like a lot of these advancements you've been toiling away in the back end for some time. This is exciting news and an exciting time, especially when we look at the world of cloud. Can you tell us one trend that you're seeing right now in cloud space? Yeah, you know, it's fairly obvious to many, but when I first was involved with LightEdge, and this was years ago, but even more recently, customers call it early adopters or maybe the early stage adopters, they were making a decision and even not too distant past around the question of should I move to the cloud? Can I move to the cloud? And then in many cases, they would go all in on a public cloud type of decision. Today, the advancements of the learnings of these businesses, not only the businesses that actually had gone to the cloud initially, but also the businesses that are actually considering what's the appropriate platform or cloud for them to move to. They're taking a more pragmatic view of it, which is what are the unique requirements or the unique workload definitions that I need to satisfy for all of my applications and capabilities? And by doing so, which is the appropriate approach, by doing so, they're truly going at a deeper level to understand the best location for a particular workload based upon a very unique set of requirements. And that's what, frankly, LightEdge has been doing for a long, long time, which is assisting clients in trying to understand that kind of a decision, which we're completely okay with, by the way, because there are so many different types of workloads that some of them actually are built for a public cloud environment, but in many cases, and in almost all cases, I should say, most customer environments are going to be segmented into a hybrid cloud type of environment, and that's going to include some apps in public, some apps in private. So really taking sort of a customized approach to each use case, really. Yes. I like that, yeah. And talking about new innovations, LightEdge was also unveiled this week, I believe, a new website. So what's new and improved with the iteration of this website? Yes, I am really happy that you brought that up because I am very excited about that because people that have dealt with, you know, multiple generations of a website certainly can relate to this. The ultimate goal behind the technological, you know, updates or the advancements to speed really is the user experience. And we wanted to provide an environment that frankly allowed, you know, decision makers, business decision makers who were going to visit, you know, a LightEdge website and look for information that might help them in some of these decisions that they've got to make. We wanted to make that user interface as friendly as possible to provide flexibility in that information journey. And that really is the ultimate goal. And I think the team did a great job with that and I appreciate you bringing it up because it's something we've been working on for a while. And I should mention too that if you look over my shoulder, you can scan that QR code and get right to that innovative new site. So hint, hint guys for those who wanna see the new unveiled website just this week. All right, so looking into the future, I love this question, especially when I have a CEO in the hot seat, as they say. Yeah. But tell me, looking in your crystal ball, what do you envision for LightEdge in 2024 and beyond? You know, it's personally speaking, it's an exciting question. And the reason for it is we have, I think, at least one of the few times in our journey as a business that's been around for 20 years, we have what I think of as the perfect, you know, alignment of a team that culturally is just, you know, obviously I'm not objective, but is I think one of the best cultures in the industry. And secondly, that we've got a set of services and capabilities that we've been working on and for a long, long time. And we have a set of robust data centers that frankly, every one of them is a world-class data center. None of them are retrofit type of facilities. These are really, really nice facilities. And then combine that with a phenomenal investor. Our partner in the investment community is really supportive. We're looking to grow significantly. That has just started. We did two acquisitions in the first 18 months of our relationship with our investor GI partners. And we're just getting started. So you're gonna hear more about not only M&A, you're gonna hear about further advancements in our platform for further growth on the organic side. And then we're really taking steps into becoming more nimble for our customers when it comes to innovation and advancements to our infrastructures and service capabilities. And part of that is we recently hired a new chief growth officer that I'm not sure we have announced yet, but shortly we will. And we're pretty excited about that. All of that is centered around how we advance our business not only on the product and the service side, but on the geographical side as well. So growth, growth, growth, 2024. Yes, yes. Watch out. Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jim. And thank you viewers for tuning in. As always, happy networking.