 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Kutaya of JSA, and here at ITW 2019, joining me, my good friend, Mr. Ravi Mahalagam, SVP of Business, of International Business for HGC Global Communications. Thank you for having me. Ravi, it's a pleasure having you. Yeah. So tell us, we're going to sort of hit on all these hot topics that are on the minds of many here at ITW. Let's talk smart cities, SDN, blockchain, and what HGC's role is in all of these emerging technologies. Well, I think I would like to start off by saying that, you know, everything these days is about digitization and softwareization. So we are in the midway of our transformation of our company, and that has enabled us to move on into new areas and space that is now being, you know, in demand. So, for example, first and foremost, I think it's our marketplace initiative that we have done. So what we have enabled is in Asia today, we are able to, for a customer to come to our portal and be able to get connectivity to major data centers across Asia, in Hong Kong, and connect to an internet access provider, all in one portal. So I think this allows a customer experience to be like he goes to a Facebook website, he remains there because he can do Libra currency, he can do connecting to his friends. So in one marketplace, you can do a lot of host of services. So this is our beginning point. It's an ambitious project on our side that has propelled us to look further into other areas of automation. So one that we are championing at the moment is the blockchain initiative, which is an initiative that we're looking at solely for the purpose of how we can improve our productivity and speed up, especially in the area of settlement at the back end. So business has now grown exponentially, but you also need the speed. The speed has to be speeded up. So blockchain and the trusted smart ledger technology, we believe is one of the areas that can help improve our operation, not only within our own organization from one section to another, but also cross function to other companies as well. So if more companies adapt smart ledger technology on a similar platform, you then be able to do settlement at a far much more quicker pace. So imagine you would have an end to end experience for your clients, the client orders a service, he provisions it quickly by himself, and then he gets a hot billing that says that, okay, you've ordered this, you can do, instead of per month billing, you can do per week or per day billing. That is what our vision is. And he's also talked about smart city. So Hong Kong is a leading market in Asia, which is in the forefront. Hong Kong needs digitization and smart city is one of the areas that they're looking at. So this is an area that they are propelling. And we have a lead role in this space. We are doing POC with the Hong Kong government, especially on smart lamp posts. Yeah, so this lamp post has multi functions, and it allows traffic management, weather control. It also becomes an asset for us to look at placement of microcells for 5G. So these are new areas that we are looking at developing. This is so exciting. Yes, Hong Kong has a special place in the world as a leader in these new technology deployments. And so your work is really being viewed, not just on a national front, but on a global front for sure. We were just talking about this in New York, actually, at one of our events. So, yeah, very exciting to hear that. And also, there's a new trend happening where OTTs are coming more into our marketplace, really leading an expansion role. What is HGC's role, challenges and opportunities as you guys go ahead and address OTT needs? So in the OTT space, we are one of the leaders to assist OTTs to expand globally. We've done a pretty decent job, and we serve these OTTs, especially from Asia, to more than 20, 30 cities around the world. We did a pretty decent job on that, and basically this has been providing them with customized infrastructure as a service solution, which is a combination of several components, hosting network, local eyeball, and bringing it all together and providing it in a recipe that meets their requirement. But they are now also moving up the chain, especially when they expand, some of them are in the cloud services. So they are looking at managed service as a step up, so they need eyes and people on the ground to help them to do this management. So we can uplift our capability to play that role. Say, for example, in Sao Paulo, they've set up a cloud, probably because of their resource requirement, they could not have people, food soldiers on the ground. It could be our team that could help them in their managed services. So I think the evolution of infra moving into platform is where I think we can aspire to go in the next stage. I love that. You're basically an extension of their network infrastructure team in-house. I love that. Correct, correct. Rightly said. Are you from Telco? Really? Focused only on telecom and tech. When we skip ahead in the calendar year, where do you think HGC will be a year from now? So my focus for our company, especially my international business organization, is to fully transform our company to become a fully digitized user experience for our clients, which is the sector of the carriers and also the corporate customers of ours. And I hope that one year down the road, a customer would be able to enjoy our services in our marketplace by themselves and then receive the bill. And what we would be playing at the back end is the analytics, improving the customer experience and continuously applying DevOps in improving our services to them. So my hope is one year down the road, when we meet again, I should be able to tell you that we are fully transformed and I could say proudly that international business of HGC is a digital company for the carriers and customers. I love that vision and you guys are certainly well on your way to realizing that. So where can our viewers go to learn more about HGC? Well, obviously you could go click HGC and you'd find about a few hundred thousand search results, but go to hgc.com.hk. You'd find us there. HGC.com.hk. Thank you so much, Ravi, for joining us. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV here at ITW. Happy networking.