 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Welcome guys to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okitaya, founder and CEO of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, Mr. Evan Christel, top V2B social media influencer. Yeah, great to be here Jamie for this inaugural podcast, where we're sitting down with some of the most influential men and women in today's telco and data center world, who are supporting the growing and complex network infrastructure requirements of this new world we live in. Before we get to our first guest, which you are really excited about, how are you doing? How are things in the OC, as we say? Great, and as those who read my blog know, I had a baby girl, Ava Capri. So that was four months ago already. And so back off of maternity leave and back excited to be part of our amazing industry. And there's a lot going on, you know? Things are- Yeah, the things are never quiet in our neck of the woods in terms of tech. But have you got her the new iPhone? Four months old, that's about the right time, right? You know, yeah, there's the rattle in one hand and the iPhone in the other. That's my babysitting advice, frankly. That's what my mom does. She's like, just throw them the phone and they'll play with the games. And I'm like, yes, I'll also call Tokyo. So like, can we, you know? But yeah, the new iPhone is crazy too. It's 5G ready apparently. Always something to get you with the new iPhone. And it's actually a pretty big release for us people on the network side. Obviously a 5G has been overhyped to some degree, but the fact that the iPhone with 5G is real means that you're gonna see millions of new devices and applications and use cases emerging. And the network is going to have to evolve accordingly. So that's kind of what we're here to talk about. Yeah. And that brings us to our fantastic guest, dear friend of mine for 20 plus years. I don't wanna say it. But as you know, data movers, we really wanna dive into our speakers' background stories here, his careers highs and lows, unique perspectives of the future, our industry. And there was no other person that we could think of to do our inaugural data movers. Then with our amazing guest today, Mr. Eric Contag, Executive Chairman of GlobeNet and of course, President of Suboptic. Eric, welcome to Data Movers. Jamie and I wanna thank you so very much for having me here today. I'm so excited and honored to be able to share the scenario podcast. This is great. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. And Jamie and Eric is what we call a beta test. So you're our first beta tester. And you're actually calling from sunny New England in Rhode Island, which is nice to see. Yes, yes indeed. While our office is in Fort Lauderdale, I'm really enjoying the Northeast this time of the year. Yeah, it's a good time of the year. It's kind of our season of fall before the snow starts to settle. But let's start by talking about your background. I wonder if you've been in the telecom industry longer than I have, which is about 30 years. So to give you some context, but maybe you can talk through where you started and how you got to where you are now. Actually, I didn't. I didn't start in telecom and I joked that I hated telecom. As I started my career actually in San Diego, California, working for a company called General Atomics as part of the team there working on nuclear energy staff, fusion, fission experiments, et cetera. I was invited to join the startup team of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. So ever since I was very much involved with high tech, the latest stuff on the compute side, super computer graphics and so on. And I was fortunate to be there at a time where everything was new. So we tested all sorts of stuff. It was like a big startup that exists today, which led me from doing local area networks that were brand new back then to help build the first National Science Foundation Network, the NSF Net, which is the granddaddy of the internet that had replaced ARPANET at the time. And so I was always on the data side of things. That gave me the opportunity to move to Latin America where my parents were living and I had a younger brother that I hadn't seen growing up and it was just perfect to launch my first startup being a company focused on local area networks, it going to the largest companies like oil and gas and education and computer animation and so on. An awful lot of fun. From there I jumped to computer graphics representing SGI that was a household name in the animation world, eventually in the data center, in the server world and the internet. And that led me to a couple of other companies and things were going great until I joined a good friend of mine and we decided to build a basically a platform for the converged world of mobility in the internet. This is in the 1999 timeframe, early 2000s. And Evan, you mentioned before that 5G was a little bit overhyped. Well, if you go back 20 years, 3G was overhyped. So everything that we're doing today with 4G is what we thought we were going to get from, let's say from 3G. And we set out to build this startup, moved to the United States and helped with the political turmoil in Latin America were not great. And I got, let's say exposed to that convergent space. This time that startup became a statistic from the dot com bust. And then a good friend of mine called me up and said, hey, there's this Brazilian telecom operator and they're buying a subsea network. And I think it would be perfect for it because it's a turnaround job. And so we bought the assets from 360 network. I joined GlobeNet. And what enticed me to do that in 2003 was the fact that you had this amazing digital network. This was the side of telecom that I didn't really know much about. And I didn't have to do with the old analog incumbent type, let's say mentality, right? And so I saw this as a combination of a great startup and a turnaround job that sitting on a huge infrastructure asset that was the latest network that had been built in our region. And that's kind of what got me into telecom. I thought that I would have stayed with GlobeNet maybe three to five years and it's been a little bit more than that. Let's put it that way because every three years something fun different happened. Here's where I am today. And that's when I met Eric. He was a client at Telex, one of our early, early clients. And I had started at Telex as their head of marketing and PR. And yeah, and so early on we were trying to figure out, what else can we do to promote GlobeNet to the telex community? Let's do postcards. That's right, that's right. We did a lot of those things. I mean, we've had a lot of firsts, I think, at GlobeNet and something that I'm very proud of, right? We were the first subsea cable in our region to have carrier ethernet as one of our products when people are not even talking about that. We extended our networks into new markets even terrestrially over OPGW wire lines to service, Manaus, for example. We've replaced cable segments and so on. So there's a lot of things that were happening and latency, we became the very first subsea network basically to look at latency and deliver services between the Bovespa Sock Exchange and New York City. So definitely a lot of firsts and a lot of fun. As if we were on a high speed yacht versus a little Robo. That was actually one of our postcards, Jamie, absolutely. And yeah, I mean, carrier ethernet too, it was MEF certified, I want to say, right? And we were doing things early on that was just incredible and now has become, through Eric's leadership, subsea standards, if you will. And your role, not just as chairman of GlobeNet, but now president of Suboptic, I mean, you are always speaking and gathering committees together to think about the future of subsea. Any thoughts there? What do you see coming up? But absolutely, I think our success at GlobeNet had also a lot to do with the fact that right from the beginning, we embraced partnerships that had to be part of our DNA because we couldn't do it all alone, right? So you have the subsea network that is basically a link between two terrestrial networks and nowadays more link between two data centers. And so you depend on somebody else to be able to deliver that end to end service. And when we started, for example, with carrier ethernet and the MEF and so on, we had to convince our partners in Latin America, this is a good thing, right? This is something that you need to look at. And I think when you look at technology or what I've always done is I look at the developing world, right? I look at the U.S. I look at Europe and see what's going on in Asia and so on. And you know that eventually what's happening here today will happen in the developing world versus the developed world. If you look at that, it will happen in say three years, five years later, right? So that gives a little bit of time, not necessarily to be the beta tester or version 1.0 user of our product, but you're already looking at what is established, what's going to work, and you need to make sure that the economics are good, right? And if you apply that also to the subsea industry, now putting on perhaps my suboptic hat, as you know, Jamie, we completed a phenomenal series of online executive round table spotlight that you so graciously helped us to pull off. Earlier this year, where we were asking the question, how is COVID-19 impacting the global communications fabric? And I think the learnings that came from that series is that our global network proved to be resilient. I mean, at work, it didn't collapse, but there was many lessons learned that came from that, right? And so when you look at that entire ecosystem or the value chain, you have to ask yourself the questions, why did it work? Why didn't collapse? We had excess inventory, we were able to use that because we did see a huge spike of data, in particular, say, in our neck of the woods in the April timeframe of this year, March timeframe. And people didn't think that it was going to continue to grow, they thought that it would plateau out. And if you look at the numbers, gaming jumped initially 30% and then you asked the same people, let's say at the exchanges, how do you see that a month ago? And it's now continues to be in a 50% growth rate. And if you talk to one of the larger OTTs, they looked at their media platforms and they didn't jump 10%, 20%, they jumped 35 times. That is huge. And to be able to absorb that amount of data, you just need to have that physical infrastructure ready in the available headroom, let's say, to do it. But we also learned many, many things in that process, right? Awareness of the global communications infrastructure is critical. So the work, for example, that other organizations such as ICPC are doing to talk to the governments, to push them to have a single point of contact to, hey, we need to work with each other because we've got all these oil tankers part, which happened actually in the month of late April, early May where nobody was driving, right car. So we're gonna store all that fuel. They have to park outside of the protection zone or subsid gables because if they anchor, you could create damage or you've had a crew on a ship, seafarers already for months that need to go home. Can you quarantine inside the ship, for example? So people started to talk and collaborate. And I think that that was critical and has been critical keeping our global communications infrastructure running, right? So the question is what happens now? I mean, major OTTs, for example, accelerated their 2021, 2022 investments to 2020 just to make sure that they didn't run out of bandwidth, right? So those are some of the things that we are seeing. And I think collaboration and co-opitation is key in order to keep that fabric strong, resilient and up and running. Wow, well done. Well, that's something I wasn't even aware of, you know, as Americans here in the US speaking for myself in the telecom industry, I don't know anything about the LaTam market. I would probably say that's true for most of us in the industry here. So give us a snapshot or some highlights of what's happening in the market. I know it's very diverse and it's a huge area geographically and market-wise. What are some highlights and trends that we could learn from? And some insights you might be able to share. I think from a telecom perspective, you're gonna find that that LaTam is not too different, let's say then in some cases the US or Europe, right? So if I'm gonna talk broadly, for example, about the operators just like we in the United States had to learn to deal with work from home, I mean, think about it. Most networks were designed to provide that level of resiliency to the enterprise, to physical buildings downtown New York, right? Or downtown LA or places like that. And those areas are empty. People are working not only from home, they've decided to move to rural areas. And so now you need a very different network. And mind you can go through New Hampshire, through the streets or here in Barrington, Rhode Island or even Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And you'll constantly see trucks of people blowing new fiber, fixing fiber, laying fiber. And I think one of the things that COVID-19 has done is it has accelerated that fiber to the premise, fiber to the home process. And I think that we in our industry need to stop thinking of that reach to the end user as a last mile. We need to start thinking of it as a first mile. So if you really want to do eventually good telemedicine, maybe be able to talk to a patient that is doing remote dialysis and stuff like that, that network needs to be really, really strong. So some of those things we're also seeing in Latin America where perhaps the last mile was a lot weaker than it is in the United States. So different telcos had to really rush to build out that last mile to increase capacity, to redesign their networks, to move the IP traffic, to make them more resilient. I think it's also pushed for, we need updated regulation. If we want to launch 5G and everything that it has to do with 5G, we need to look at how is this going to be done? And what you start to see is that there's not enough capital to do everything. So if I take Brazil as an example, which is 10 times larger than perhaps any other market in Latin America, you start to see companies that are saying, look, we did okay in 4G, but maybe this is not our strength anymore. Let's sell off that wireless group. And you're gonna go back to having maybe three strong wireless operators because the capital that is needed to cover an entire nation that's the size of the United States is huge. And then let us focus, perhaps on a backbone network or a national backbone network that is very strong, that is very robust, et cetera. I mean, if you think of 5G, Evan, you know this better than many, many people, you're gonna have, it has the capability of delivering 10X data to the handset. And in order to do that, you really need to beef up those networks. Now, you may argue that 80% of that is maybe gonna stay local. Well, is that really true? I mean, that's a question that we need to ask ourselves. Is that really true now with work from home? I think that some technologies, like for example, autonomous vehicles, they're gonna develop first here, maybe in Europe. And then eventually they're gonna go to Latin America where perhaps today they may not make that much sense. But if you think of long hauled trucking routes where you have tons of accidents, where you have drivers that are underpaid, they're driving 23, 24 hours a day and then you have accidents because they fall asleep, those are routes where you say, man, in order to get my mango from the Amazon delivered here at my closest shopping center, we need to improve, let's say services. I think honestly, we're at a phase where we're gonna see exponential growth and innovation and technology. There are a lot of things happening just because of Moore's law, right? Just because we have doubled the capacity of compute and double the capacity of graphics over the last 18 months, following, let's say that the Moore's law, where now there's things that are possible that before were just not. Medical imaging analysis, for example, and things like that. Because we live in a connected world, you see scientists in Latin America collaborating with scientists all over the world, not just the US, right? Where they're looking at the next generation of vaccine where they're saying, hey, maybe we can use CRISPR to do some gene editing to come up with the next coronavirus vaccine and stuff like that. So all that interaction, all that global interaction requires very robust networks. And so while many of these subsea networks, for example, that are being built around the globe in particular, these massive large networks are optimized to connect data center to data center, we're starting to see projects that are circumnavigating globes, like for example, the latest release of a network around Africa. Because if we don't start thinking about those things, those island nations, for example, or the Caribbean or the smaller countries, if they're not considered, you're just increasing the digital divide, right? So infrastructure is gonna play and continue to play a very important role in our connected world. Yeah, and COVID obviously throwing a huge spotlight on how digital divide is really impacting the future, education and how do you raise a child in this if you have no steady internet? It's definitely an issue. Now, circling back throughout your career, thinking of all the amazing experiences and knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time, give us one piece of advice that you would say to yourself at the beginning of your career, what would it be? If I would have learned about the stock market back then, I would have invested in these tiny little startup companies that we use to build up the network since San Diego, people like Cisco that were in a garage up in Menlo Park. This is all well and good, but I need stock tips today. I need names and I'm on my Robin Hood app here. I need to trade something now, so I'm looking for some stock tips, please. Just kidding. That's one that we'll probably have to take offline, right? But it's critical for people to start looking at these things and when I talked to my kids, I said, look, my older son that just starting his career in San Diego, California of all places where I started, he says, dad, what should I do with this? I said, well, get yourself a broker and start learning about these because there's many companies out there that are unicorns today that 10 years ago, we didn't even know what their names were, right? And it's just gonna get faster and faster and faster. So focusing on things like artificial intelligence and a lot of those offshoots, that's where, if you wanna take the rest, there's a couple of companies there that should definitely look at. At home, alcohol delivery, Drizli, that's the future. Particularly in the pandemic. But in all seriousness, shifting gears to your personal life, how are you coping with the pandemic and have you developed any new hobbies or maybe focused on some existing hobbies to kind of keep sane in this difficult time? Well, yes. I mean, I was on the road 95% of my time and then come March 17th, when I flew back from Sao Paulo, all of a sudden that stopped, right? So absolutely. So you learn to cope, right? I mean, there's things that you can do, obviously to keep engaged. But one of my hobbies is aviation. And I think, to some extent, yours, right? Well, mine from a Microsoft Flight Simulator standpoint. So I think you might actually fly real airplanes if I'm correct. Ooh, I do. I started early in my, when I was in college, I got my private pilot's license to work up through my different ratings and my instrument and commercial take at the flight instructor. And then life happened. I moved from San Diego, California to Latin America and they didn't recognize my ratings and I had these startups and eventually a family. For 30 years, I stopped flying. And a few years ago, a business friend of mine asked, we're sitting there in a discussion of two CEOs, what's your passion? I started to talk about strategy and whatever. Well, that's not good. What about you? I said, God, I used to fly. Oh my God, are you a pilot? I said, yeah. And then I got pushed to gotta get back into it. You gotta do this. And I did. And it's been super rewarding. And so during COVID-19, of course, I went back to the books because most flight schools were closed and then as they started to open up, then I rejoined my recurrent training. You have to stay on top of things. It's a good time to relearn the things that you haven't learned. I actually did a course called the Rusty Pilot Seminar just to bring me up to speed on things that needed to be done. And now I'm keeping it up and the freedom of flying in the US is amazing. And so it's definitely a passion of mine. Fantastic. Well, we may need to hitchhike on one or two of those flights coming up, but thanks for sharing. Absolutely. So I'd like to move us into what I call our rapid fire section. So tell us just the first thing that comes to mind when I say what's an upcoming purchase you're thinking of? Come on, none, gotta save, it's COVID-19. Well, okay. iPhone 12. Favorite food that would surprise people. Well, most people know of me as a carnivore. I love anything that is, let's say that is grilled, but I would say in that space grilled artichokes. Oh, that's a good one. I like that one. And if you could watch one movie on repeat for 24 hours straight, I'm not sure why you would, but if you could, what would it be? My favorite movie is Cinema Paradiso. And that's one that definitely speaks to me and I would mind it seeing it over and over again. But if I would have, let's say, just a fun choice, there's a bunch of them, like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon Series or- Everyone knows that Godfather is the only answer for that question, come on. My husband plays it on repeat every time. It's so weird. My nephews are like, is this what Christmas means? Just walk away, walk away. It's a wonderful life. Come on, that must be one of the best movies. So what celebrity do you think you look like? Andy Garcia. Good one. Oh, can I see it, yes, yes. And one word that people like to use to describe you. Charismatic. Yes, absolutely. Innovative. Innovative, yes. All right, so thank you so much, Eric, for taking your time to be our inaugural guinea pig for your data movers. We were just thrilled and getting, like I took some notes because I didn't realize all these things that you have done and getting a deeper dive into your background was so cool. You think you know someone for 20 years and then, you know, Artichoke, come up. Artichoke. So Jamie, I mean, I'd like to thank you and Evan, this certainly has been an awful lot of fun and I think we need these things, Evan. So you asked about... Yeah, this is the height of my social outlet for the week here. So yes, we'll meet for a beer, a socially distanced down in Providence, you know, sometime this winter. Absolutely, I'd love that for sure. All right, take you up on it. If you enjoyed today's data movers podcast, be sure to check out jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming data movers episodes, releasing every other week on Wednesday mornings, as well as other JSA podcast series. And additionally, you can follow us on Twitter at jscido and of course, at Evan Christel. I'm sure you're all following him, but if not, you know, he's the guy on Twitter to follow. On meantime, thank you all. God bless and happy networking.