 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell and joining me today, I'm pleased to introduce you to Stuart Lawrence, Vice President of Product Engineering at Stream Data Centers. Stuart, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you, Bob. I'm excited to be here and talking to you guys today. Yeah, we were really excited for the opportunity to chat with you a little bit. We obviously know Stream very well. They're friends and partners and all of that with us. And so pleased to have you join the mix here in the conversation. So Stream doesn't need an introduction, but we'd love to hear more from you in terms of how your role specifically supports both the needs of Stream, the company, but as well as your external customers. Sure. Well, my role in product engineering is multifaceted from the perspective that I support the sales efforts and the sales team and Michael Citra's team in particular, architecting the most cost effective and efficient deployments that we can come up with for our customers. And then using a feedback loop right to look at our design and iterate on our design so that we can adapt and incorporate anything new and innovative. And that of course means that I get to evaluate a lot of new technologies, look at the way people are doing things now, latest approaches. But I would say Stream have been doing this for almost 24 years now. So they already had a really terrific product and before I showed up. And you can really tell that the design has been laid out and iterated by folks with a great deal of experience, building and operating data centers. So it's really actually kind of nice to be able to iterate on something that's already excellent. But not to underestimate the tenure of your career, right? I mean, you've been doing this yourself for two decades, right? Building mission critical and mechanical systems solutions is one way of putting it. You could probably put it better than that. But tell us about what are some of the things that you've seen? I mean, you talked a little bit about innovation and how things have sort of evolved, but what are some of the things that you've found are the key elements to really delivering high standards of service? Yeah, I've worked in everything from nuclear power stations and hospitals and production pharmaceutical labs and then probably the last 12 to 15 years really in mission critical IT side of business data centers. And maybe I'm gonna be a little controversial here. I think it actually all starts with integrity. The mechanical, the electrical components, yeah, those are obviously highly important and we have to kind of be serious when we approach how we design and architect those things. But integrity for me is something that maintains standards and services, service excellence, right? And they're always gonna be bumps in the road, but you've got to do your best to make a good plan, stick to it. And then if you do have to pivot or iterate, be open and clear about it with your customers, your team, your partners. In my experience, I've always found that you get given a lot more latitude to succeed if there is trust. And for me, trust starts with integrity. So more specific to data centers though, there are many brilliant people in our industry, right? I mean, it attracts the best and the brightest and designs as a result often evolve fast. And to maintain, and so for me, I strive to maintain my student ideas at work, surround myself with thought leaders in all the facets, right? There's so many facets to our industry. So much opportunity for young people coming in, right? To hone their skill in one segment and then become a thought leader in the business. So, I try to stay humble, keep in touch with the technology trend and see what new ideas are coming out there. And actually, surprisingly, I think these days, it's not just the new ideas that are disrupting the status quo. A lot of the time, it's older ideas that are being recycled and upcycled and coming back and disrupting even new ideas. So I actually kind of find that exciting too. Yeah. Well, and I was just gonna say earlier, when you were speaking of integrity, it feels to me very well aligned with, what Stream thinks of as their secret sauce, right? In terms of people and collaboration and how does that, how do you integrate those things in your day-to-day? Yeah, and in my day-to-day, I'm interacting with a large number of folks on the team, right? All our architects, engineers, consultants, construction teams, operations teams. So, I pull a lot of that together. And candidly, the talent that our leadership team has been able to pull in is remarkable. But, you know, having worked for some big organizations and sort of lots of egos, right? What has struck me the most impressive is that the team is so humble and so collaborative. It's such a great environment and it breeds such a culture. You know, sitting down with customers, the pride that resonates from our team and the interaction that our customers get as a result is just tremendous. I mean, it really is no surprise to me now that the innovation that comes out of this team has such great impact for these clients. Yeah, I mean, we see that every day and all of the great things that we see coming out of stream in terms of, you know, innovation and advancement and expansion, but the team's just such a pleasure to work with. You know, we see that and we see that from the industry as well, I think, feels that way. So, yeah, I see that. I wanted to ask you, so you've worked all over, right? And, you know, whether physically in these places or working on projects globally, you know, in Europe and in different cities, New York and Austin and the United States, how does that influence the way you look at your work, you know, in terms of sort of the global perspective of this? Yeah, I've been really fortunate to get opportunities to work, you know, on sort of all the continents, right? Maybe not so Antarctic, but, you know, I think the thing that sort of most challenged me through working in different locations and with different folks is that I always, you know, I've always tried to seek to understand someone else's point of view first before applying whatever technology or approach that might be top of mind going in, right? And as you can probably tell, I'm pretty passionate about engineering and technology, often to a fault, actually, but facing cultural and even technological approaches that are different from what I was taught, you know, taught and sort of forced me to be open-minded and give other ideas a chance first, right? And so I think that resonates for me at Stream Data Centers too, right? It's like I said before, everyone's quite humble and collaborative and willing to listen and try to understand different ideas. And I think that breeds, you know, a very innovative environment for sure. On top of that, you know, working and living in different parts of the world has actually made me quite frugal. I like to be materially and energy efficient, right? I mean, it's driven me to try to engineer out waste. And so I think that certainly resonates well in the industry right now with a lot of companies having high ESG focuses. Yeah, I like to bring, you know, the two ears, one mouth to the situation and listen to lots of different ideas and see how we can make things better. So on that note, what do you see, you know, I mean, this is always the tough question, right? The sort of crystal ball question, but you know, from an engineering perspective, what do you see are the, you know, the big bets for you, you know, in terms of what's going to help you get to where you want to go to meet the demands that are coming for Stream out of the market? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on in the market right now, right? With supply chain challenges and the great resignation labor force challenges and things like that. So, but I'm fortunate, like I said, you know, Stream data centers have been doing this for almost 24 years and they've been working very hard actually with a lot of their large customers over the last decade on refining the electrical topology or constructability of the product and, you know, working with procurement programs to make sure that inventory is well aligned with the demands that are coming our way. So I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants here. You know, so for me, my role and the way I look at what's coming down the pipe in terms of big changes is somewhat sort of smaller iterations, right? You know, we're really focused on not delivering snowflakes, right? And we were trying to be much more focused on constructability and repeatability, reliability, ESG, all those things come to mind. But then, you know, one of my passions is mechanical engineers and mechanical side and I love to get into the weeds there and work on, you know, iterating and bringing a better product or bringing something new that potentially disrupts the way we can deliver capacity. And I think I've got something that maybe we'll come back to at some point. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. A follow-up, a teaser. I like that. That's great. You know, Stuart, thank you so much for just taking a few minutes with us today. It's been a pleasure to meet you and to hear from you. And, you know, you seem like such a perfect streamer to me. Is that a word of streamer? Yeah, I'm happy to be here. For sure. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Very thought-provoking questions and class to be upon. Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you, viewers, for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts.