 Hi everyone and welcome to JSA TV coming to today live from the floor of ITW here in National Harbor I'm Barb Mitchell and joining me is Jeff Martin vice president of business development for Ascent Thanks for joining us. Thank you Barb. Thanks for having me We're having a great conversation just before and then they pulled us on air And so I want to continue that conversation We were talking a little bit about you know the history of ascent You know what ascent is up to now, but I'd love for you. Let's just start there Let's start with if you wouldn't mind telling us just a little bit about ascent Especially for those of our viewers who may not be as familiar Ascent is a vertically integrated operator of critical facilities We operate 90 data centers hundreds of edge locations primarily in North America And what that means for our customers is that we are focusing on the preventative the corrective maintenance the actual care and feeding of their critical facilities Now it doesn't extend just to the critical facilities It goes beyond then sometimes into the racks we provide traditional smart hands We provide remote site services and when I say that we're vertically integrated It really means that we try and focus on everything that it's going to take to run a facility So we have construction and design and engineering all in-house So in addition to some of the the critical facilities that that we run for our customers We also try and make sure that we're there for them 24 7 we have a 24 by 7 operation center It's based in st. Louis So we're able to take calls in the middle of the night And help them out regardless of whatever problems are happening at their facilities Yeah, they know they can rely on you if anything if anything comes up But you know this ascent has been in this industry a long time 1998 I believe in the data center industry But let's just change right and and and that's had an impact I think even on how what you focus on is an organization So can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely the data center industry has gone through multiple changes over the past 20 something years I think innovations from the cloud where people decided they would need to go off-premise Now there's been a trend in what people are calling cloud repatriation Where maybe the cloud hasn't been the answer for everything and I think that the The concept of a hybrid IT solution Where they have cloud on-premise and off-premise and have there something in a co-location Has really been driving people to bring some of their workloads back on site But it's not the same as when it was when the some of those workloads left One of the big trends that we see is in what people are generally calling the edge Now we we've been managing a lot of edge locations for a long time We just didn't call it that and these are the hundreds of sites that we operate for our telco and fiber customers These are traditionally pops head-ins ila huts fiber huts now all of a sudden they're all edge But I think what people are really referring to when they talk about the edge today is The definition of a modular data center three ten five 20 racks anything that Is going to bring the workloads closer to the actual customers that that are consuming them Generally what the way we define the edge is any critical facility that can't quite justify having an actual person there So now you end up with a problem of a critical facility still needs the same care and feeding Still needs the same vendor network number of vendors partner management that needs to occur for that to run efficiently But you can't have an actual person there So we provide in it in one of the innovations is the concept of a fractional facility support Clever. Yeah, very clear. I mean that's a very clear proposition and very clear positioning So thank you for for sharing that with us. I think it's helpful and I'm you know when we think about You know some of the conversations that you alluded to but also the the evolution of our industry It puts pressure on you as an organization to keep up with that right and and to continue to innovate And so how are you doing that? Really innovation comes from a couple places Obviously internal and external. So I'll talk more about the internal Yeah, one of the one of the great advantages that we have Is our partner network over the years in order to support all of these facilities We've had to develop a vast network of 700 plus vendors that we work with and vetted on a regular basis So with these are sources of innovation They're sources of communication and we also work with our in-house team going back to the vertical integration The advantage is of having Designers designers engineers people that focus on construction traditional smart hands and the facilities people all under one roof Has really given us a lot of points of information to pull from so when an innovation comes up We're able to propagate it out Across our customer base edge was a great example of that everybody's facing the same challenge, but Nobody really knows exactly what it is So we're they're looking to us for some definition and assistance in how to support something that they don't maybe quite fully understand Right. Yeah Yeah, so that's great as you come in as the as the experts and the trusted partner for a lot of these folks And so when we start to think about Beyond here, I mean this week will Will wrap up itw in a few hours And I'm sure you've had lots of conversations this week that you probably want to continue to part question. First of all What are some of the conversations you've been having and and that you hope to continue to have Over the year ahead And then I guess the second part of that is how can people find you to to have those conversations A lot of the conversations have been some of the conversations We've been having for a long time, which is we a company has critical facilities either a data center or Some variety of edge location and at some point it doesn't necessarily make sense For them to be operating it on their own there could be some operational challenges They could just be looking To us for some expertise outside of their multi could even be a multi-discipline organization that they have as well So there's always going to be a conversation to be had around Bringing in a third party to bring in our expertise And even just have a conversation around what does it mean? To have somebody else run your facilities Yeah, and going forward to answer your second question Best places is either on linkedin or on our website ascentcorp.com Happy to answer any questions great ascent or ascentcorp.com. We're both It's final day here at ITW and Jeff Thank you so much for for joining us and thanks for sharing so much great information about Ascent and thank you viewers for tuning in to jsa tv coming to you live today on day three of ITW at national harbour Until next time. See you soon