 Welcome back to JSA TV live from PTC 23 the newsroom for tech telecom and data center professionals Buffy Harakitas and we're coming to you live from the PTC hub at the biggest PTC to date and joining me today is Jim Masterson CEO of Light Edge Jim welcome to JSA TV yeah so what do you think of the conference so far it's amazing it's kind of overwhelming there's so much going on here so yeah it's my first time so it's been an experience just getting like know my way around yes yeah so first time here at PTC and and what a first time experience at the biggest PTC ever for sure so for viewers that don't already know can you tell us a little bit more about Light Edge and what makes Light Edge so unique absolutely Light Edge is a cloud and data center company based out of the Midwest Iowa and we've been the company itself has been in business for 20 going on 25 years I've been the CEO for about 19 of those years and we've been in this industry executing if you will on a business case to deliver very sophisticated cloud services to the compliant oriented okay well I heard that this past year 2022 was a really monumental year for Light Edge let me give us a few of those like highlights we grew organically at about 20% year over year which is into itself a great thing on the other hand we also executed on some pretty interesting mergers and acquisition activity we acquired a company out of San Diego by the name of Infinite okay so it gave us extension into the West Coast which was great came with three different data centers and today we're about 11 data centers in eight markets and we continue to grow right so on the move for sure so we have to keep an eye on where you're headed next and you recently announced some exciting new partnerships you know that kind of enable our next generation one with Iowa State University why don't you give us a little bit more about some of those partnerships and how they're enabling and empowering our next generation absolutely we've got a real passion and have for years about how to find and develop young talented you know STEM type individuals and we've taken a couple of steps to do that beyond the tradition one is we partnered with high schools in the San Diego area to do internships for underprivileged students and we have it phenomenal success with that we typically bring four interns in for about six months from a local high school and we basically give them access to everything that our team does in that San Diego marketplace in an attempt to try to get their passion and excitement for technology so it's been it's been phenomenal and we inherited that opportunity from infinite and we've beveled down that's working really really well yeah I mean that's great I mean it's so important to make sure that we're committed to empowering the next generation even from you know from women in data centers too as well and making sure that we're building you know and working with these universities even at the high school level level to help you know encourage and inform them about the wonderful opportunities that are available in technology so that's amazing is there anything else that you wanted to talk to us about today what we can expect from light edge in 2023 yeah the other we've done is with Iowa State University we're based out of Des Moines and so one of the things that's been really really fun is that we light edge has a what I perceive is a world class onboarding sales model so we can find people we can train them and educate them and get them passionate about basically selling our types of services we've partnered with Iowa State University to develop a program that gives their students that are interested in it type sales environments access to our internal light edge onboarding processes in an effort to train them at a whole different level than they can even get from the university so that's been fantastic from a go forward standpoint I don't think there's anything that's going to change to be honest with you that the pace that we're operating from is going to stay the same and even probably increase so I would expect us to continue to grow organically at the level I indicated and then in addition to that we're still going to do some acquisitions this year if I had to project I imagine we'll do at least one if not two more acquisitions well definitely keep our eyes on light edge this year for some of that explosive growth going and some acquisitions ahead so super exciting news so where can viewers go if they want to stay up to date about light edge and stay in the know about all of these exciting opportunities that you're offering to the next generation and partnerships absolutely we if you visit our website www.lightedge.com or we're very active on LinkedIn as well so if you follow us on LinkedIn you'll get all that type of information great well Jim it's been such a pleasure to meet you today thank you and thank you for joining us on JSA TV I appreciate it and thank you viewers for tuning in lives for another fabulous episode live here from sunny Honolulu Hawaii for PTC 23 happy