 What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity of Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that, one of which is certainly the hyperscalers, but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth, but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included, but you also have this massive connection. Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovation from leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Barb Mitchell joining you today live from Capacity Europe, and I'm joined by Scott Harrison, Director of Sales for K&N Global Filtration. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, thank you for having me. Yeah, it's our first time chatting on JSA TV, but of course we know K&N well, and hopefully most of our viewers do, but we'd love for you to share a little bit more about K&N if you wouldn't mind and yourself and your role and all of that. Absolutely, yeah, so I'm the new boy actually, so I'm only about six weeks in into K&N, but I am a young veteran of the data center market, so my career is about 20 years, the last 11 years of which we're with a company called Geist and then for Vertive after acquisition in 2017. So yeah, I'm a face of the industry so to speak, but new to K&N. So yeah, I think it's quite interesting having K&N as a brand in this market because we've done a lot of shows this month, this is our third major show in October, and we've still got a week to go. It's the most common thing that happens as people come up to us on stands and say like, what are you guys doing here? And we've got a very famous and popular brand in performance automotive industry, so back 50, more than 50 years ago, we designed a high airflow washable reusable air filter for combustion engines on motorcycles and performance automotive vehicles. So yeah, no, fast forward today, and we're in the debt center market, and those same things still apply. So high performance, high airflow, air filters for the debt center market, which reduce the energy of the fans that obviously serve the calling on the floor of the data center. And of course, being washable and reusable, they are highly sustainable as well. So yeah, and obviously, if there's a cost element involved here, there's another key pain point and if you're not replacing these things every six to 18 months, and these things have got a 15 year life cycle, then there are cost and sustainability metrics there as well. Right, that makes sense. I mean, so much to cover off here, and I mean, you said third show in a month, we're not, as you said, we're not even done October yet, and we're here on the first day, first official day of Capacity Europe, and lots of conversations already. And I find, I don't know about you, but in the last few shows you've been at just this month, and probably over the course of the entire year, sustainability is such a huge topic on everyone's mind. It's something that's made its way into the priorities of so many companies. Talk a little bit about that. You mentioned it in your sort of intro, but if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit more about the solutions that, the Canon solutions and how they help your clients solve that. Sure, yeah, so sustainability is obviously a very keen and poignant thing for the debt center industry, but one thing I've been really taken back by in my first six weeks, being out there in the market, speaking to some established debt center customers, but not just for the debt center, but also for industrial applications like corporate head offices, for example. There is a lot of air filters being used out there. So just as an example, if you think of a fan wall in a hyperscale debt center or a large co-location debt center, you can have hundreds and hundreds, and we've seen up to 550, I think, in just one fan wall. So every single one of those fans has got a filter behind it. So can you think about that? When you change those filters every six to 18 months, depending on the air quality, they all have to go into landfill or incineration. So it really is quite a huge thing, but the volume is something that's been quite alarming really for me. But not just the landfill we save inside, it's the performance. We've got this 50 years plus of being experts in the air filter business, so we've taken that technology and put it into the debt center application. So we've seen up to 40% increases in airflow. Now what that means is greatest is flowing in a low resistance environment, but the fans behind them are spinning much slower, so they're reducing the amount of energy they consume. Twofold, we're going to get sustainability metrics for reducing landfill, but also the spinning down of those fans is saving energy. So helping against things like PUE and making sure that we've been as efficient as we can with the facilities side power. One other thing, tenders. Like years and years ago, sustainability used to be a small section at the bottom of a response for a co-location to host the IT facilities of organizations, and now that has changed. Now it's very much the forefront of those tender responses and just as simple as replacing an air filter really does help to contribute to those metrics. Yeah, and I mean, as we've said, and thank you for your answer. I mean, sustainability is so key, but it's certainly not your only benefit, right? Lots of others, some of which you touched on, but talk a little bit about that. I know that you have some custom options, some more off-the-shelf options. Talk about the difference in those and what benefits those bring. Sure, definitely. So customization will be a key thing. It's certainly a big part of our initial capability. So if you think back to the automotive days, when the first or new cars were coming out, we were designing parts to go into those cars. There's now 9,000 part numbers on the automotive side. We've got about 100 so far on the global filtration side. So we will be building that. So our initial capability will be building out what we would call custom product, but the reality is it will be non-standard at the start. As we build up that product portfolio and then we'll stop in our European warehouse to understand what the demand on those certain parts is gonna be. So we'll be super quick then, if someone phones us and say, we've got a certain fangal manufacturers part and we can match the part number to the system they've got and we can ship out very quickly. Right, and so let's talk more about that then, just sort of in terms of, we're gonna talk more in a second about your global capabilities and offerings, but just as a lead into that, how do people connect with you in terms of, they have this need for an air filtration solution for their data center, what's next for them? Definitely, so it's fairly simple. So you can take out your existing disposable paper and plastic air filter, which we'll normally go into landfill, replace that with a K&N washable reusable filter, just the straight swap. So what we need to know is the dimensions, the Merv or ISO rating of that air filter and the quantity you're gonna need. We'll put those in and then immediately we'll see the performance upgrades and these things will last for up to 15 years. We're saying 15 years, I mentioned earlier that we were talking, there's actually an air filter in the office in California that from the automotive side, there's done a million miles. So we say 15 years, but the reality is these things are gonna go much longer. Good to be prepared though in case, right? For sure, yeah. And so you're located here in London, right? And so you have team in Europe, team members in Europe, obviously also an office in the United States. So, and I mean, which is great, the data center industry as we know is global, connectivity is global, everything that we're doing in this space is. And so tell us a little bit about that in terms of how you've come to this global offering and what that means for your clients in the industry. Sure. So currently engineering is done from California and manufacturing is done from Texas, so Dallas and Texas. We are setting up some warehousing facilities in Amir and also in APAC. So with me and my colleague at the moment, we're setting up the business outside of the US. So big focus on the other major markets outside the US, APAC and Amir being very big focuses for us. And these are major debt center markets, right? So we've got some big plans. So the immediate plans are to make sure that we flesh out the team, make sure we hire for the right roles and get the right people in the right places and expand through that. We'll also be looking for partners, both distribution partners and reselling partners, certainly in the more remote regions, regions such as the Middle East and other parts of Asia PAC, we'll be looking to sign up some partners into that as well. Fantastic, yeah. Well, Scott, thank you for joining us. And so for our viewers who may want to connect with you, connect with K&N, how can they go about doing that? Sure. So all my details will be available somewhere I'm assuming after this or... On the screen? Our details, yeah. Could you point this? Yeah, right there. So yeah, we're generally available. If not, I'm on LinkedIn, the team are out there, so just sort of reach out and we'll get in contact for sure. Perfect, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you for, I hope we have many more opportunities to have these sorts of conversations on JSA TV. We thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you, viewers, for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity of Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that, one of which is certainly the hyperscalers, but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth, but it also serves as a hub for itself, as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included, but you also have this massive connection with North America, a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing, even though it's a very mature market. It's growing up in the last year, it was about 35%. Only 35%, if you take that back about four years, compounded annually, it's about 41%. So still at that Moore's law, kind of doubling every year type of growth. So that's a lot of growth. And that aligns pretty well with global growth in international bandwidth. And yeah, in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that, I mean, they're doing a couple of things. They have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that, they're kind of doubling down on that, but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions. Some of that they will go to other regions, but some of those will continue sir, out of Europe. So you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well, finding you still have the traditional hubs, but you sort of have, you want some diversification around those, you move into some other ones as well. So lots of things going on Europe center. And that really takes us to another hot topic, network advancement. We're talking these into connections, global growth, expansions, so network advancement, absolutely on the minds of many. Of course, Jezebel, you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks, as you mentioned earlier. And of course you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, Wholesale Service, Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors. So quite the lineup of thought leaders there. Can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel? Absolutely, as you know, that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint, right? But is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network? And what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer, the customer's perspective, right? In saying, hey, we are the consumer of this types of service. What's important to us? What does it matter? Why does it matter? And what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion? And are we interested in particular type of SLA? A quality of service or what are the drivers, the motivation for us? What are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network? But lastly, what's really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world? So there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough. Are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future? What are those improvements if you are? Well, there's certainly a motivation for that. I mean, you'd like to think you could take for granted basic inventory management and service delivery. But in this business, that can be really hard to do and to be fair, that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell. I mean, there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you wanna try and modernize all that while taking all that with you. So there's a lot of work to be done there but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible. But as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that. Everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there. So can you automate a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks, across borders and assure that service from end to end and these aren't new issues. You know, this is a big deal but automation can certainly be a... And we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it. Jezebel, let's talk a bit about interoperability. How do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces? Well, there's lots of different types of interoperability. As networks, we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another, right? So the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well, beyond technology there's a ton of complexities, right? There's commercial relationships. There's a software if you're actually doing automation how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another? You need to have some sort of standardization, translation to be able to move, to speak. Everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have an ubiquitous environment and beyond the technology, right? Beyond the software technologies and the infrastructure technology and the software technology there's also the business terms, right? We need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage. No network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network. There's just not enough capital to invest in that. So all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous, smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base and that is what the enterprise customers are looking for. That's right. That's so right, well said. All right, so Eric with everything we just discussed how do you see the service mix evolving? Well, there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that. You can start at the very core. I mean, again, it's a big wholesale event so you're always gonna have your bread and butter transport and transit services. And I guess probably what's going on there they're getting less granular. 10G is becoming 100G, 100G is becoming 400G and then in some really big time transactions you've got more fractions of an entire fiber or even building up new fiber. But then you go the other way down the value chain where in the enterprise side or this whole wholesale ecosystem again that Jezebel was alluding to of you have maybe 80% of the customers. Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, real estate and the networks within. I'm Barb Mitchell here today live at Capacity Europe in London where we're continuing our coverage of JSA TV and today we're joined. Now I'm joined by Mark Cooper, VP, Market and Business Development at Atlas Edge. It's great to be back. I mean, the last year has gone so fast. Oh my gosh, hasn't it? I know it's been a year since we were here last but I saw some of your team members I had the opportunity of chatting with them at Data Cloud in Monaco but what was that five, six months ago? And so, you know, we stay on top of what of course you're doing at Atlas Edge and we did have that update but a lot's happened, things are moving quickly. Give us an update. What's happened in the last sort of half of a year at Atlas Edge? Yeah, I mean, it's non-stop we're all about growth. We listen to our customers, the customers are always looking for expansion opportunities. So probably when we last caught up we just announced the data center one acquisition. So that's extending our footprint in Germany kind of reaffirming our focus which is where we're not really interested in doing the flat markets, we're much more about the tier two markets so that's happened. I think excitingly for us as well, Lisbon is a new market for us. So I think Lisbon is one of those markets it's becoming more and more relevant from a subjective perspective but also from a scale perspective because of the advantages of the power pricing there. So Lisbon is a really, really exciting one for us because it's the first new country we're going into and it's the first kind of real new greenfield build for us. So that's where we're going kind of more drops on the map. Yeah, but that's not all right because new acquisitions, new markets which is always exciting to talk about. I mean, we've been chatting a lot here today and at various shows. I mean, it's just such a global infrastructure market obviously, so that's very important but to really bring those forward partnerships are key and I know that you've had a lot of those. Can you tell us a little bit about your partnership? I mean, we kind of, for us, it's great to have the direct relationships and there will always be large customers where we have those relationships but we also know to get the reach and especially on a global basis, it's about partnerships. So we announced, we had from the SDN side, Console Connect, Megaport, we had Packet Fabric because we see that they're just such key building blocks because we really focus on building the ecosystems in the data centers and it's the mixture. It's having the platforms, it's having the networks and it's having the enterprises and partners like, you know, Console or Megaport, they really drive the growth of that ecosystem plus, you know, it's an extension of our sales force. Yeah, so key. I mean, you're ticking all the right major boxes and so when, you know, you've been with Atlas Edge since the very beginning, I believe, right? And so when you think about where you've come and where you're going, what excites you the most? Just the size of the opportunity. If I think that, so I joined in June 21 before the company formally existed, we launched in September 21 and if I just look at how much we've grown, the acquisitions we've done, the number of staff we've added, the locations, the relationships we've built with customers, I think it's, if we look back, no one could have predicted how much we've grown and how quickly it's grown and there's just so much in the future that's coming as well. I think if we were here last year, we probably talked about the metaverse. This year, AI is the buzzword and we just see that there's a whole wave of opportunity coming there, whether it's at the scale ends with the larger facilities or whether it's kind of addressing the enterprise demand from an AI perspective. But I think next year, we'll still be talking about AI. Probably. I think the metaverse will kind of come back on the agenda as well because it's kind of closely linked. Yeah, they are, right? And driving so much of what's happening and the need for supply and the infrastructures to support it, right? And so, yeah, thank you very much. I mean, this is a quick little update from you, but is there anything else that you want to share before we wrap up here and ways people can maybe connect with you for more, I mean, if people better stay two and a half years then you've been moving so fast, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, if you look at the growth we've gone through in terms of what we've done with kind of geographic expansion, what we've done with acquisitions, what we've done with building the team out now, you know, in the beginning, there was the core that we had. We've added some very, very interesting names to the mix now as well. We're very focused on green as well. You know, we're still seen as the bogeymen in the industry because we're data centers, but we have a lot of focus around what can we do to improve energy efficiency? What can we do around water? What can we do about integrating with the local environment as well? So Lisbon, again, is a great example. So the local council are building a police academy next to the data center. So great from a security perspective. Right, yeah. But also the waste is gonna go there to either power their donut shop or their gym. Oh well. Nice, nice. Yeah, and you're right. I mean, sustainability is, you know, it's all the things you're talking about. Metaverse AI, sustainability is so key to the future of what we're all doing here, not just from an industry, but from a planet perspective too. So thanks for mentioning that. And thank you for tuning, or for joining us and we appreciate, always appreciate connecting with you. Yeah, it's always a pleasure to talk to you guys. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that. One of which is certainly the hyperscalers, but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth, but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included. But you also have this massive connection with North America, a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing, even though it's a very mature market. It's growing up in the last year, it was about 35%, only 35%. If you take that back about four years, compounded annually, it's about 41%. So still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth. So that's a lot of growth. And that aligns pretty well with the global growth in international bandwidth. Yeah, in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that, I mean, they're doing a couple of things. They have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that. They're kind of doubling down on that, but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions. Some of that they will go to other regions, but some of those they'll continue to serve out of Europe. So you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well, finding you still have the traditional hubs, but you sort of have, you want some diversification around those, moving to some other ones as well. So lots of things going on Europe center. And that really takes us to another hot topic, network advancement. We're talking these interconnections, global growth, expansions, so network advancement, absolutely on the minds of many. Of course, Jezebel, you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks, as you mentioned earlier. And of course, you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, Wholesale Service, Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors. So quite the lineup of thought leaders there. Can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel? Absolutely, as you know, that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint, right? But is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network? And what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer, the customer's perspective, right? And saying, hey, we are the consumer of this type of service. What's important to us? What does it matter? Why does it matter? And what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion? And are we interested in particular type of SLA, a quality of service? Or what are the drivers, the motivation for us? What are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network? But lastly, what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world. So there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated, it's not enough. Are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now in the near future? What are those improvements if you are? Yeah, well, there's certainly a motivation for that. I mean, you'd like to think you could take for granted basic inventory management and service delivery, but in this business, that can be really hard to do. And to be fair, that's hard to do because some of these networks sort of have legacies extending to Alexander Graham Bell. I mean, there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage. And then you wanna try and modernize all that while taking all that with you. So there's a lot of work to be done there, but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services, you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible. But as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough, you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that. Everybody wants to be special and get the best deal. And this is capacity Europe. It's a big part of what goes on there. So can you automate a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks, across borders and assure that service from end to end. And these aren't new issues. This is a big deal, but automation can certainly be a big part of that. And we're hinting about it. So let's go ahead and talk about it, Jezebel. Let's talk a bit about interoperability. How do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces? Well, there's lots of different types of interoperability. As networks, we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another, right? So the technologies already exist on the physical layer. We do pack packets easily, but when it comes to interoperability, Eric said it well, beyond technology, there's a ton of complexities, right? There's commercial relationships. There's software, if you're actually doing automation, how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another? You need to have some sort of standardization, translation to be able to move, to speak. Everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment. And beyond the technology, right? Beyond the software technologies and the infrastructure technology and the software technology, there's also the business terms, right? We need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion, but in a different area where the network that they are working with does not have current coverage. No network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network. There's just not enough capital to invest in that. So all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous, smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base. And that is what the enterprise customers are looking for. That's right. That's so right. Well said. All right. So Eric, with everything we just discussed, how do you see the service mix evolving? Well, there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that. Start at the very core. I mean, again, it's a big wholesale event so you're always gonna have your bread and butter transport and transit services. And I guess part of what's going on there, they're getting less granular. 10G is becoming 100G, 100G is becoming 400G. And then in some really big time transactions, you've got more fractions of an entire fiber or you're building up new fiber. But then you go the other way down the value chain where in the enterprise side or this whole wholesale ecosystem, again, that Jezebel was alluding to of, you have maybe 80% of the customer's locations you can service with your own network but nobody has a ubiquitous network, that other 20% or whatever it is, you have to go elsewhere with partner networks to achieve that. And a lot of the way that works now by default is with kind of a VPN and using a local access from some other carrier and kind of terminating the VPN service on a partner network. But that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved. And in some cases, even private lines, for say for example, directly the cloud providers are in the mix as well. So that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these VPN defaults are no longer, well, the VPNs are no longer the default option. So we have some, the market's kind of influx with those choices, but you still have that fundamental need to partner with other networks. So it'll be really interesting to see how that involves as the service mix evolves, as the technology available changes and yeah, to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over a quarterly network. Yeah, absolutely. We all need each other. That is definitely one of the core messages here. And one of the reasons why Capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time. Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovation from leaders in global connectivity, real estate and the networks within. I'm Barb Mitchell joining you today from Capacity Europe where we're live and talking to our great guests such as Nile Looney, Key Account Director for Indigo. Welcome. Yep, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for joining us. And we're only on day one, you know? And so things move quickly around here. We're halfway through this first day and how are you finding the show so far? Yeah, it's really great. Like a lot of good topics coming up this morning on the initial keynote sessions like big things are security, network resilience, the war for talent, all the various bits and pieces that are kind of coming across the telco industry and carrier space at the moment. Right, yeah. And we had the opportunity to chat with your team at ITW which I can't believe it was six months ago already or five or six months ago. Yeah, time flies. And I know, you know, time flies but a lot happens in that amount of time and I think that Indigo and you and your team it's no exception. Can you tell us a little bit about what's been happening? Yeah, we've been busy rounding out our capacity in the States especially over the last six months. Like we've increased the size of the team in Denver in our knock and sock there our first restriol and subsea networks. And then we've coverage now with direct engineers across almost 34 states. And by the end of the year we'll have coverage in 40 states. So that's really been a big development cycle for us over the last couple of months. Yeah, and I mean, it continues to be the case that hyperscalers play a major role in the push towards global connectivity. And can you talk about that and how you address that from Indigo's perspective? Yeah, so we're working for various hyperscalers around the globe, supporting them with our network services and first line maintenance activity. The biggest thing about the hyperscalers that we've seen is they've injected a huge pace into the rollout of infrastructure over the last couple of years. And that's coincided really with the network operators who would have been the traditional developers of that real estate falling back because of their CAPEX constraints and that side. So we're starting to work now for the hyperscalers around the globe in managing and support monitoring their networks, their subsea systems, for example, and supporting them in the deployment of that infrastructure. Yeah, so let's talk more specifically about Indigo and just I'd love to share with our viewers if you wouldn't mind just some of your key differentiators and how you approach the market. Yeah, so as we've been in business for 25 years, we're designing, deploying and supporting various vendors, operators, infrastructure owners, we're vendor agnostic companies, so we're a services company working across the globe. The probably some of the biggest things that we see as differentiators for ourselves and some of the key components mentioned here today, especially in the context of the rising risks in the geopolitical arena is around the security and Indigo are a framework-based, standards-based organization, so we're fully ISO 27001 accredited, our subsea and terrestrial NOx are also fall under that accreditation as well as NIST compliance. So that compliance and framework activity and along with the design, deploy and support services that we have, that's really adding value to a lot of our customers. Right. So for any of our viewers who wanna connect with you or your team, what's the best way for them to do that? Yes, so the best thing is me and Nailuni, key account director with Indigo, I'm at this event today, so reach out to me on LinkedIn or on our website and also Andy Miller, he looks after all of our subsea business. Please feel free to reach out to him on LinkedIn or on the event app here today as well. Fantastic. Thank you, thank you, Mal, for joining us. Yep, thank you very much. Appreciate it, it's always nice to catch up and thank you viewers for joining us on JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, happy networking. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity of Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that, one of which is certainly the hyperscalers, but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth that it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions, particularly Africa and the Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included, but you also have this massive connection with North America, a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in the West and Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing, even though it's a very mature market, it's growing up in the last year, it was about 35%. Only 35%, if you take that back about four years, compounded annually, it's about 41%. So still at that Moore's law, kind of doubling every year type of growth. So that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with global growth in international bandwidth. And yeah, in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that, I mean, they're doing a couple of things. They have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that, they're kind of doubling down on that, but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions, some of that they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of Europe. So you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well, finding, you still have the traditional hubs that you sort of have, you want some diversification around those, moving to some other ones as well. So lots of things going on Europe center. And that really takes us to another hot topic, network advancement. We're talking these into connections, global growth, expansions, so network advancement, absolutely on the minds of many. Of course, Jezebel, you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks, as you mentioned earlier. And of course you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, wholesale service, Palo Alto, innovation advisors. So quite the lineup of thought leaders there. Can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel? Absolutely, as you know, that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint. But is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network? And what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer, the customer's perspective, right? In saying, hey, we are the consumer of this types of service, what's important to us? What does it matter? Why does it matter? And what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion? And are we interested in particular type of SLA, a quality of service? Or what are the drivers, the motivation for us? What are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network? But lastly, what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world? So there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated, it's not enough. Are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future? What are those improvements if you are? Well, there's certainly a motivation for that. I mean, you'd like to think you could take for granted basic inventory management and service delivery, but in this business, that can be really hard to do. And to be fair, that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell. I mean, there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage. And then you wanna try and modernize all that while taking all that with you. So there's a lot of work to be done there, but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services, you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible. But as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough, you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that. Everybody wants to be special and get the best deal. And this is capacity Europe. It's a big part of what goes on there. So can you automate a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks, across borders and assure that service from end to end. And these aren't new issues. You know, this is a big deal, but automation can certainly be a... And we're hinting about it. So let's go ahead and talk about it. Jezebel, let's talk a bit about interoperability. How do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces? Well, there's lots of different types of interoperability. As networks, we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another, right? So the technologies already exist on the physical layer. We do pack packets easily. But when it comes to interoperability, Eric said it well. Beyond technology, there's a ton of complexities, right? There's commercial relationships. There's software. If you're actually doing automation, how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another? You need to have some sort of standardization, translation to be able to move, to speak. Everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment. And beyond the technology, right? Beyond the software technologies or the infrastructure technology and the software technology, there's also the business terms, right? We need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage. No network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network. There's just not enough capital to invest in that. So all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base. And that is what the enterprise customers are looking for. That's right. That's so right. Well said. All right, so Eric, with everything we just discussed, how do you see the service mix evolving? Well, there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that. You can start at the very core. I mean, again, it's a big wholesale event so you're always gonna have your bread and butter transport and transit services. And I guess part of what's going on there, they're getting less granular. 10G is becoming 100G, 100G is becoming 400G. And then in some really big time transactions, you've got more fractions of an entire fiber or even building up new fiber. But then you go the other way down the value chain where in the enterprise side or this whole wholesale ecosystem, again, that Jezebel was alluding to of, you have maybe 80% of the customer's locations you can service with your own network but nobody has ubiquitous network that other 20% or whatever it is, you have to go elsewhere with partner networks to achieve that. And a lot of the way that works now by default is with kind of a VPN and using local access from some other carrier and kind of terminating the VPN service on a partner network. But that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved and in some cases even private lines say for example, directly to cloud providers are in the mix as well. So that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these VPN defaults are no longer, well, the VPNs are no longer the default option. So we have some, the market's kind of in flux with those choices, but you still have that fundamental need to partner with other networks. So it'll be really interesting to see how that involves as the service mix evolves, as the technology available changes and yeah, to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over coding network. Yeah, absolutely. We all need each other. That is definitely one of the core messages here. And one of the reasons why capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that. One of which is certainly the hyperscalers, but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth, but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging trends. Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Barb Mitchell joining you today live from capacity Europe here at the O2 in London at the Intercontinental. And joining me is Niraj Shah, Director of Business Development for IX Africa. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Yeah, we were having such a nice chat. We had to cut off our chat so we could come join the rest of the audience here. But tell us, you know, let's carry on our conversation. We were talking about IX Africa. We were talking about the growth in general of the industry in Africa. But let's start with IX Africa. And if you wouldn't mind telling our audience just a little bit about your company. Sure, you know, IX Africa is a carry-neutral data center. It's the first one in Eastern Central Africa on a hyper-level scale. And basically, it's one of my panel discussions this time around as well, where we're talking about the whole transition of digital in Africa, how Africa is digitally just being enhanced and a lot of transition happening. How do we build it? So what we've done is we've built up a hyperscale data center to make sure that internet connectivity is available for everybody. So data center would generally be the heart of it, the core of it, and then the connectivity goes around with, you know, with all this, what I call the spinal cord. So, you know, things work well. So yes, we built one of the biggest ones. We've actually gone live since we last talked. We're live with the one megawatt right now and we'll ramp up to four and a half megawatts in Nairobi, Kenya. And it's just a fantastic data center. You know, it's wonderful. Yeah, and so you started to talk about it, but so you have this panel that's coming up today during the show. And I mean, it's so important. I feel like every time I'm here, at Capacity Europe especially and other shows, people are talking about the huge growth that's happening in Africa. And I know you're covering that on your panel, just the transition to digital in Africa. So just, can you give a little teaser? I know a lot of people may attend and want to hear more. No, absolutely. I think Africa is, you know, it's the next frontier, as we know, you know, a lot of lots happening in Africa. It's got a very young population. And what this is all about now is where's the new market, right? And so that's what we're talking about. The affinity to adopt to cloud. And so we look at the hype is now looking at coming into Africa, setting up huge data centers for themselves or locate with us. And so the idea is to now make sure that Africa's fully connected and that whole transition on cloud and just the availability of internet is what we were talking about. So it's going to be in essence talking about where is it going? Where is Africa going and why Africa? And, you know, you've got to be there to listen. So that's good. Yeah, good teaser. Yeah, I'd love to attend that. I think it'll be a really interesting discussion. And I know one of the major drivers behind this, other than the fact we talked about earlier as the sort of the maturity of the market from a cloud adoption perspective, but one of the things driving that being artificial intelligence specifically. Yeah, AI is a different game because people think it's far away. It doesn't, you know, it's the fourth industrial revolution as we put it. And it's progressively every revolution has been a lot shorter. AI is going exponentially growing. So we are actually cloud rather, our data center is actually ready to accommodate AI servers, which is high density servers. And why is that? Because a lot of the compute will now sit within Africa, within Kenya, instead of it going all the way outside to Europe, to South Africa, because that latency factor is going to be a very important factor. And, you know, it's this generation that really wants everything instantly. So it's going to be something that's required for, you know, for all the hyperscalers, all the cloud providers, quantum providers to be able to execute very quickly. So our data center is probably the only data center in Kenya right now that's actually ready to rock and roll in a big way. Interesting, yeah. You know, and it makes me think when you think about the huge workloads that are required for AI and some of these other things, sustainability always comes up, right? And I think we were talking before and you told me an interesting stat about the amount of renewable energy specifically in Kenya. Tell us, tell our viewers about that. So 93% of the power, the actual power coming from the grid, 93% of it is renewable energy, right? And it's made up of geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, and solar. Amazing. And it's green. So, you know, with people talking about going green, going carbon zero, we are already carbon zero as such, right? And then for our redundancies, we have to make sure that we have available power just in case. It's a requirement obviously that from a lot of the hypers and just generally, we use biodiesel for a generator. So, we're green. We're the only guys. And that biodiesel is actually manufactured in Nairobi as well. So, you know, we're there. So, having such a green grid, having good redundancies that are green and having a wonderful climate, just makes the data center operations fantastic. Very, very easy to work with. And whoa, watch. There you go. That's the breeze that's come in. And that's why you're here. So, sorry about that, guys. But there we have it. But in general, we're talking about the earth here. So, that was a good moment. But yes. And so, talking about, you know, just what happened, we have one of the largest wind farms in Africa that's based in Kenya. It generates 3,000 megawatts of power. Wow, yeah. So, yeah. And it's powerful. And it can do a lot. Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, it's quite interesting. It's actually very, very well set up in every aspect for data centers, in every aspect for cloud to grow. Because all these, whoops, and it's coming through again, I think it likes you a lot. I know, apparently. So, yeah, it's the right situation right now. And we've actually gone ahead and actually bought a second site, which is even cooler than where we are currently because it's at a higher elevation. And probably drops about 5 to 6 degrees centigrade, you know, compared to Nairobi right now, which, you know, on a good day, Nairobi is probably about 24, 25 degrees centigrade, which is great. Yeah. This will drop it down to maybe 18 to 20, which is quite cool. So, what does that mean? It's free cooling. Right. You're cooling your servers at a good rate. Yeah. So, talk about sustainability. It's there. Everything is there. Yeah, absolutely. And anything that's being built new, there, which a lot is, I think with new infrastructure builds, it's all being done so with sustainability and life from the onset, right? Absolutely. We are very aware of, you know, of getting our carbon footprint down. And I think in general, what's in also when I come back to IX Africa, we've had it as Keep It Africa in a big way where we push Africa in every aspect. So, all our, the whole building has been built locally with local stone, et cetera. We've had all our equipment provided by local existence. So, they have franchises, make sure we have, you know, availability of service and everything. So, generators, cooling, all of that. So, very much boosting Africa to grow. And Africa is quite aware. Kenya more so about sustainability and going down to carbon zero. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Naraj, thank you so much for joining us today. And what time's your panel? 12 noon tomorrow. 12 noon tomorrow, okay. 12 noon tomorrow, we can come and watch you and hear more about growth of infrastructure in Africa and digital transition. And until then, thank you. And we look forward to continuing this conversation as the year progresses and into 2024 and beyond and all the great things that are to come. Yeah, no, no. Keep your eyes on IX Africa. It's going a long way now. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Perfect. Thank you so much. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah. Well, Europe, I mean, first of all, this capacity of Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that, one of which is certainly the hyperscalers. But part of it is just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth. But it also serves as a hub for itself, as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic. And that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included. But you also have this massive connection with North America, a lot of it through the United States, to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing, even though it's a very mature market. It's growing up in the last year. It was about 35%, only 35%. If you take that back about four years, compounded annually, it's about 41%. So still at that Moore's law, kind of doubling every year type of growth. So that's a lot of growth. And that aligns pretty well with global growth in international bandwidth. And yeah, in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that, I mean, they're doing a couple of things. They have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe, and they're kind of augmenting that. They're kind of doubling down on that. But they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions. Some of that, they will go to other regions, but some of those will continue, sir, out of Europe. So you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well. Finding, you still have the traditional hubs, but you sort of have, you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well. So lots of things going on Europe center. And that really takes us to another hot topic, network advancement. We're talking these interconnections, global growth, expansions. So network advancement, absolutely on the minds of many. Of course, Jezebel, you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks, as you mentioned earlier. And of course, you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, Wholesale Service, Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors. So quite the lineup of thought leaders there. Can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel? Absolutely. As you know, that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint. But is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network? And what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer, the customer's perspective, in saying, hey, we are the consumer of this type of service. What's important to us? You know, what does it matter? Why does it matter? And what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion? And are we interested in particular type of SLA, you know, a quality of service? Or what are the drivers, the motivation for us? What are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network? But lastly, what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world? So there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated, it's not enough. Are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now in the near future? What are those improvements if you are? Yeah, well, there's certainly a motivation for that. I mean, you'd like to think you could take for granted, basic inventory management and service delivery, but in this business, that can be really hard to do. And to be fair, that's hard to do because some of these networks sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell. I mean, there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage. And then you want to try and modernize all that, while taking all that with you. So there's a lot of work to be done there, but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services, you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible. But as the technical challenges weren't hard enough, you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that. Everybody wants to be special and get the best deal. And this is capacity Europe. It's a big part of what goes on there. So can you automate a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that, as Jezebel was alluding to, across networks, across borders, and assure that service from end to end. And these aren't new issues. You know, this is a big deal, but automation can certainly be a big part of that. And we're hinting about it, so let's go ahead and talk about it. Jezebel, let's talk a bit about interoperability. How do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces? Well, there's lots of different types of interoperability. As networks, we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another, right? So the technologies already exist on the physical layer. We do pack packets easily, but when it comes to interoperability, Eric said it well, beyond technology, there's a ton of complexities, right? There's commercial relationships. There's software. If you're actually doing automation, how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another? You need to have some sort of standardization, translation to be able to move, to speak. Everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment. And beyond the technology, right, beyond the software technologies and the infrastructure technology and the software technology, there's also the business terms, right? We need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion, but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage. No network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network. There's just not enough capital to invest in that. So all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base. And that is what the enterprise customers are looking for. That's right. So, right. Well said. All right. So, Eric, with everything we just discussed, how do you see the service mix evolving? Well, there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that. You can start at the very core. I mean, again, there's big wholesale events so you're always going to have your bread and butter transport and transit services. And I guess part of what's going on there, they're getting less granular. 10G is becoming 100G. 100G is becoming 400G. And then there's some really big time transactions. You've got more fractions of an entire fiber or even building up new fiber. But then you go the other way down the value chain where in the enterprise side or this whole wholesale ecosystem, again, that Jezebel was alluding to of, you have maybe 80% of the customer's locations you can service with your own network but nobody has a ubiquitous network. That other 20% or whatever it is, you have to go elsewhere with partner networks to achieve that. And a lot of the way that works now by default is with kind of a VPN and using local access from some other carrier and kind of terminating a VPN service on a partner network. But that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved and in some cases even private lines for say, for example, directly to cloud providers are in the mix as well. So that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these VPN defaults are no longer, well, the VPNs are no longer the default option. So we have some, the market's kind of in flux with those choices. But you still have that fundamental need to partner with other networks. So it'll be really interesting to see how that involves as the service mix evolves as the technology available changes and yeah, to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over a global network. Yeah, absolutely. We all need each other. That is definitely one of the core messages here. And one of the reasons why capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe? And where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well, Europe, I mean, first of all, capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that, one of which is certainly the hyperscalers. But part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions, particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic. And that role continues for all network operators, hyperscalers included. You also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market. It's growing up in the last year. It was about 35 percent, only 35 percent. If you take that back about four years compounded annually, it's about 41 percent. So still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth. So that's a lot of growth. And that aligns pretty well with global growth in international bandwidth. And yeah, in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that, I mean they're doing a couple of things. They have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that. They're kind of doubling down on that. But they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions. Some of that they will go to other regions but some of those will continue, sir, out of Europe. So you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well. Finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have, you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well. So lots of things going on out of Europe center. And that really takes us to another hot topic, network advancement. We're talking these interconnections, global growth, expansions, so network advancement, absolutely on the minds of many. Of course, Jezebel, you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks, as you mentioned earlier. And of course you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, Wholesale Service, Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors. So quite the lineup of thought leaders there. Can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel? Absolutely. As you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint, right? But is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network? And what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer, the customer's perspective, right? In saying, hey, we are the consumer of this type of service. What's important to us? What does it matter? Why does it matter? And what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion? And are we interested in particular type of SLA, you know, a quality of service? Or what are the drivers, the motivation for us? What are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network? But lastly, you know, what's really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world? So there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone, because if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated, it's not enough. Are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now in the near future? What are those improvements if you are? Yeah, well, there's certainly a motivation for that. I mean, you'd like to think you could take for granted, you know, basic inventory management and service delivery. But in this business, that can be really hard to do. And to be fair, that's hard to do because some of these networks sort of have legacies extending Alexander Graham Bell. I mean, there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage. And then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you. So there's a lot of work to be done there, but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services, you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible. But as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough, you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that. Everybody wants to be special and get the best deal. And you know, this is capacity Europe. It's a big part of what goes on there. So can you automate, you know, a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks, across borders and assure that, you know, service from end to end. And these aren't new issues. You know, this is a big deal, but automation can certainly be a big part of that. And we're hinting about it. So let's go ahead and talk about it. Jezebel, let's talk a bit about interoperability. How do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces? Well, there's lots of different types of interoperability. As networks, we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another, right? So the technologies already exist on the physical layer. We do pack packets easily. But when it comes to interoperability, Eric said it well, beyond technology, there's a ton of complexities, right? There's commercial relationships. There's software. If you're actually doing automation, how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another? You need to have some sort of standardization, translation to be able to move, to speak. Everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment. And beyond the technology, right? And beyond the software technologies and the infrastructure technology and the software technology, there's also the business terms, right? We need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that they're a customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage. No network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network. There's just not enough capital to invest in that. So all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base. And that is what the enterprise customers are looking for. That's right. So right. Well said. All right. So, Eric, with everything we just discussed, how do you see the service mix evolving? Well, there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that. You can start at the very core. I mean, again, it's a big wholesale event. So you're always going to have your bread and butter transport and transit services. And I guess part of what's going on there, they're getting less granular. 10G is becoming 100G, 100G is becoming 400G. And then in some really big time transactions, you've got more fractions of an entire fiber or you're building up new fiber. But then you go the other way down the value chain more on the enterprise side or this whole wholesale ecosystem again that Jezebel was alluding to of, you have maybe 80% of the customer's locations you can service with your own network, but nobody has a ubiquitous network. That other 20% or whatever it is, you have to go elsewhere with partner networks to achieve that. And a lot of the way that works now by default is with kind of a VPN and using local access from some other carrier and kind of terminating the VPN service on a partner network. But that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved and in some cases even private lines for say for example directly to cloud providers are in the mix as well. So that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these VPN defaults are no longer, well the VPNs are no longer the default option. So we have some, the market's kind of influx with those choices, but you still have that fundamental need to partner with other networks. So it'll be really interesting to see how that involves as the service mix evolves as the technology available changes and to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over a global network. Yeah, absolutely. We all need each other. That is definitely one of the core messages here and one of the reasons why capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time. What do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this? Yeah, well Europe, I mean first of all this capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world. It's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that. One of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included. But you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and West Canada. So it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with global growth in international bandwidth. Yeah in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those you move into some other ones as well so lots of things going on out of Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these into connections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoyed you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom Talk Talk, Wholesale Service Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint but is there a key focus area? Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest news stories and innovations from leaders in global connectivity and digital infrastructure joining me today is Chris Harper who we know well happy to have you here on JSA TV you are currently strategic board advisor for SMART CIC and group CEO for Petworth Enterprises I am indeed correct thank you mouthful all right but I got it yeah can you tell us a little bit about SMART CIC specifically but oh wait first SMART CIC is SMART you know what else is SMART your outfit okay let's talk about that let's talk about your scarf your shirt the audience can't see your shoes they're also all right well I've got some very interesting shoes as well so thanks Bob it's lovely to be here and thanks JSA for inviting me with regards to scarf it's a it's a double-edged sword really so I wear a scarf because everyone says which one were you in the meeting and I don't like saying I'm the short one I prefer to say I'm the guy with the scarf but the other more serious reason is sadly my son passed away six years ago this November and so every morning when I get up I just have a moment where I choose a scarf or a cravat just to have a think about him put it on and out I go so that's that's the reason behind the scarf and it's quite an emotional one and six years on it doesn't change she died of cancer and it was horrible but so then what about the shirts hey and we're really going for it with the shirts so we've SMART CIC are an atypical company and so we decided that we're going to have SMART SHIRT Fridays and we're rolling out out to everybody so any of our customers any of our prospects send us a picture of you and your SMART SHIRT on a Friday let's not do Dress Down Friday let's do Dress Up Friday and let's have a bit of fun with it because let's be honest our industry isn't that exciting so I try and put a bit of excitement into what we do so that's that's the reason behind the scarf that's the reason behind the snazzy shirt shoes socks you name it yeah I mean I wish the camera would go down so we could see the socks on the shoes but trust me they're special they're SMART and yeah and we're it's not Friday but it will be Friday by the time this show is over it's Tuesday here day one right a classy era by on Friday maybe everyone can snap some photos once they're back in their respective homes and sending some photos but yeah thank you thank you for that and I always do remember that every time I see you and the scarf and I have a thought for you and your family so let's now talk about SMART CIC the business and so if you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of an overview I joined SMART CIC back in May we announced it just at ITW and my role there it's a bit of a Ponzi title strategic board advisor but in essence I'm there to help the owners grow the business to grow it from a sales perspective and make it scalable and we have some specific fiscal targets that we're working towards but ultimately it's to grow sales and that's what I'm doing so what do we do we provide in the line services end to end so what does that mean what's the line oh could you excuse me while this goes off that's a customer it's a customer wondering where I am right yeah so we provide the line services so that could be point to point could be DIA could be broadband could be fixed wireless access and fixed wireless access is not the new kid on the block but the rising kid on the block so we provide the line we provide the equipment we can do the shipping of the equipment we can install the equipment we can connect it to the line and we turn the service up then when it breaks we can send the engineer to fix it so what does that give our customers control of delivery so the traditional method is you buy the line from someone you buy the equipment from somebody else someone ships it for you and someone else installs it for you so you've got four moving parts there those four moving parts are all controlled by four different companies so something's going to go wrong and quite often it does so what we do is we take that out of the equation and we just run the whole project so gives you control but also it reduces the total contract value because suddenly the Americanism we don't have to do truck rolls every time we just have one guy going out doing all the work so one company installing everything no more multiple visits and our motto or our tagline is to make our customers look good in front of their customers so we're not interested in going after the end customer we're working with the big carriers making them look good in front of their enterprise customers and that's our USP okay and and beyond that you I mean I believe that you refer to it's in the company name smart CIC right you refer to your offerings as smart offerings and so yeah let's talk about that in terms of what makes your offering smart for the digital infrastructure space couple of examples so we look at the total solution or the total problem some customers come to us with problems some come to us asking for a total package so if we give an example of LD stores I don't really have the LD stores in the US but in six countries in Europe for Telefonica we staged the equipment we installed the equipment and we did the total maintenance of the equipment so 24 seven we are sat waiting for something to go wrong in an LD store our guys go straight out and they fix it they're on site within one and a half hours now that's quite an industry leading standard most people are four hours LD are very strict they want it in one and a half hours so when Telefonica came to us with that request that wasn't how they were going to do it so we looked at it from a smart perspective and said this is the better way to do it they were sending the equipment to the locations not to the engineers send it to a location it gets lost send it to an engineer it's his job to make sure he's got it just makes a great difference another example would be for British Telecom we do BP petrol stations in Poland Germany and Spain for that we provide the connectivity the equipment the install and the break fix and in that case things are trending towards fixed wireless access so we're seeing a move away from DIA and broadband and more that's probably not true move away from broadband towards fixed wireless access so that's how we do things smarter so we had another customer come to us they got problems with demarcations their service has been bought by a very large carrier and dropped over there and they need it over there the system says no that large carrier and I used to run Sprint International for a long time I know that large carriers if the computer says no they just can't do it they can't work around the process but we can so we look at this look at the problem give a smart solution off we go yeah so your sort of solutions come from obviously the the goal and the mission of smart CIC but also from you your background right you've I know that you've been around a long time you mentioned Sprint I knew you when you were working with Bell and lots of other roles that you've held over the years and so you started to talk and touch on a little bit some of the the moves that are happening in the industry and some of the trends but can you talk a little bit more sort of peel back from that a little bit and just what you're seeing in general in the industry as some major trends so it's very interesting if I go if I go back to my very early days I started working in this industry in Russia I worked in Russia in the late 90s it was a bit cowboy territory lot of fun and I took Japanese manufacture into Russia and into South Africa then I joined a carrier's carrier during the dot-com boom and the dot-com bust our biggest client when I was working for that carrier was Sprint Sprint took me on board and said can you build a worldwide network yeah and we built a worldwide network and I ran everything outside of the US for Sprint for the best part 15 years then I took a lovely package I'll be very honest and I own a number of other businesses so you refer to Petworth Enterprises Petworth Enterprises is my investment vehicle and I invest in a number of businesses including recruitment travel blah blah blah then I came back and joined Bell Bell wanted to grow their services internationally Robby and I knew each other very well because I was his customer sorry he was my no I was his customer yeah back in the day and we built out during COVID and we had we had some good success COVID held us back to be honest then I went to Eastern Europe and I worked with Nutera I was Chief Revenue Officer for Nutera and we saw some very dramatic success there and again what was that success driven by that was really people moving away from the larger carriers and moving to an SD-WAN solution so they have an SD-WAN overlay and an underlay and the underlay is the place that we play in so that could be fixed wireless access that could be broadband could be DIA point now we're seeing that enterprises are looking they're always trying to reduce costs and the first place they look is on the IT shop so it really is that side of the business that we're concentrating on now we're looking at how can we help our customers reduce the costs to their customers whilst keeping service at least as good as it was and some days I'll be honest that's a struggle but if you look at our latest product CellSmart so CellSmart is all over LinkedIn at the moment and that's where we have a number of vehicles traversing the globe literally testing the 4G and 5G networks because you can look at the maps of all the providers and they'll all tell you where they are we know exactly where they work and where they don't we can tell you to a specific location who is on that there who's nearly on that and who isn't working at all so that's what we're seeing so you know just sort of to I guess close our conversation it's always we always need more time I think there's so much to talk about but you know I think we're sort of nearing the end of day one here at capacity Europe we'll have another one of these next year but let's focus on this week and what are you hoping for the most you know in some of the conversations you're having with folks this week so obviously my my prime job at Smart CIS is to drive sales we've come here with a big sales team very experienced sales team and we're looking to get more business obviously but we're really we're looking to work with customers in non-traditional ways so you know I'm not going to say I've got the best service in that country yeah I'm going to say what's your problem let me provide you the solution and then from there we get an intelligent conversation because otherwise we just become a commodity and we've seen what that does it drives prices down and it was an old friend of mine that said that's the race of the pigs and we don't need to go there so right okay so for our viewers who may want to connect with you during the week or after the show is over how can they connect with you so chris.harper at smartcic.com or upstairs in booth 318 okay smartcic oh perfect booth 318 and not only right now we have one of our smart vehicles traveling through Manhattan oh really and we can see all the test results live from Manhattan today and it'll be in Manhattan Tuesday and probably till lunchtime on Wednesday oh great so yeah there we go that's fun thanks for sharing that and thanks for joining us oh well thank you always a pleasure yeah and thank you viewers for tuning in to jsa tv and jsa podcasts until next time happy networking thank you what do you see as a digital hub for europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well europe i mean first of all this capacity europe in europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth that it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly africa and middle east that are quite dependent on europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with north america a lot of it through the united states to interconnect all the huge facilities in europe and in the west of Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent you know only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that morse law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with global global growth in international bandwidth yeah in terms of the the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these interconnections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at capacity europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoyed you'll be joined by executives from equinex uber deutsch telecom talk talk wholesale service palo alto innovation advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many in the industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended like Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but but certainly you know in parts of this business where you know there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these aren't new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be a big part of that and we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it Jezebel let's talk a bit about interoperability how do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces well there's lots of different types of interoperability as networks we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another right so the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well beyond technology there's a ton of complexities right that there's commercial relationships there's software if you're actually doing automation how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another you need to have some sort of standardization translation to be able to move to speak everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move the things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment and beyond the technology right beyond the software technologies of the infrastructure technology and the software technology there's also the business terms right we need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who's used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage no network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network there's just not enough capital to invest in that so all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base and that is what the enterprise customers are looking for that's right so right well said all right so Eric with everything we just discussed hello welcome back to jsa tv and jsa podcast where we're covering the latest stories trends and innovations with leaders and the digital infrastructure and global connectivity markets and one of those leaders that i'm referring to of course is jennifer holmes chief commercial officer with london internet exchange also known as links welcome jennifer hi thank you for having me yeah absolutely we're so excited to have you here at capacity europe and beautiful london we are in the new a new space here at the show it's really really nice kind of exclusive feel in this space we're in right now so um we're excited to just get a quick update about the latest that's going on with links so you guys are the uk's premiere peering community and the leading one of course so if you could just share a little bit about what you do for folks who don't know how you connect companies to cloud services and other digital infrastructure yeah certainly so um links has been around for 29 years it's our 30th birthday next year which we're very excited about and we originally started off with sort of five large uk networks coming together to exchange their data with each other and it's snowballed from there really so um we provide infrastructures in london but also in manchester scotland wales and then in we've got a site in north america and then we also have partnerships in in south arabia as well so we provide that infrastructure for networks to join and once they've joined that infrastructure they can then freely collaborate with all of the other networks on that track on that uh i'm not on that land so in london our main service is peering which is literally just the exchange of data between networks but we also have a offer a lot of other services like microsoft as you're peering other cloud services as well closed user groups all sorts anything you might need to for your interconnection needs you can get links here in london excellent excellent so happy early 30th birthday that's very exciting yeah that's quite a quite an accomplishment um and you know you're talking about global expansion and you know we've certainly seen some rumblings in the news from from links about some of your expansion news in africa in the middle east and um and you know of course we're here in london and the uk is still a very very important region so um can you just shed some light on the latest in particular in the uk market yeah yeah so as you said obviously we've been focusing a lot on africa at the moment we announced on your exchange in arabia which will be going live later in the year but as you say the uk is our home market it's our bread and butter it's what we what where a lot of our business happens so we like to make sure that we have a lot of engagement with our members especially those in the uk making sure we're serving their needs back here whilst at the same time tackling that global expansion um and we do that um mainly through having a lot of engagement with our members and events and things like that but also making sure that we're really keeping up to date with the industry in the uk making sure we're keeping up to date with all our data center partners as well as looking at new partners in the uk so this is a very fast moving industry there's new players coming in all the time so we make sure we come to events like this and that we collaborate with any partners in the industry and specifically in the new new uk that we think might benefit our members so that can evolve into expanding into new data centers or providing new services via partners so yeah we still do have a lot of focus on the uk and it's a lot around partnerships and building building that presence yeah so that's a perfect segue to the next question which is about thank you very much any new services I hear you're kind of rolling out to your core uk you know to reach even more uk customers and can you tell us a little bit about that yeah so we've expanded a lot more into sort of dedicated services for for our members who might be trying to just have dedicated connections with another member so we've we launched private VLANs a technical term but it's basically a one-to-one connection a couple of years back and now we also have closed user groups which is where a group of our members who are specifically interested in the type of traffic can have that special connection and just just have that secure connection to collaborate with each other that way working with all the cloud providers as you can imagine they're all pretty big names and we're bringing those on as and when we can so we have a number of cloud providers available in London and Manel in Manchester as well so yeah it's just a case of keeping up to date with the the technology and what the technology can offer us and what we can then offer is avid value to our members excellent awesome so we've talked a lot about the expansion that you have going on new new products roll out how you're serving your existing members is there anything else you can tell us about what's what's on the horizon what's next for links yeah I think I've covered quite a lot that's a lot but yeah it's really about listening to the members what they want where they want us to go because we're non-profit and we're membership owned we have to think really carefully about where we're going and what we're using member funds for so all of our future business cases are very carefully considered we're speaking to a lot of data sensors about different markets global markets at the moment there's a lot going on in the Middle East in Africa and we announced Nairobi and we're looking at other locations but stressing that we only decide on business plans if they make absolute sense to our members and we need to make sure that anything we do we're making a real difference to where we're going to so so yeah watch this space yeah absolutely watch the space and thank you so much for joining us and giving us a quick update on the latest work plans Jennifer thank you for having me yeah absolutely we're so glad to have you and to our viewers stay in touch watch this space because we will be continuing to live stream interviews here at Capacity Europe for a few more hours today and then tomorrow morning and as always happy networking what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all this is Capacity Europe and Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it is just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in West Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with global global growth in international bandwidth and yeah in terms of the the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of Europe so do you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on kind of Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these interconnections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom, Talk Talk, Wholesale Service, Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region or their footprint but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but but certainly you know in parts of this business where you know there's not a lot of margin to to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these are new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be and we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it Jezebel let's talk a bit about interoperability how do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces well there's lots of different types of interoperability as networks we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pack packets from one place to another right so the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well beyond technology there's a ton of complexities right there's commercial relationships there's software if you're actually doing automation how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another you need to have some sort of standardization translation to be able to move to speak everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment and beyond the technology right and beyond the software technologies so the infrastructure technology and the software technology there's also the business terms right we need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage no network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network there's just not enough capital to invest in that so all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base and that is what the enterprise customers are looking for that's right so right well said all right so Eric with everything we just discussed how do you see the service mix evolving well there's you know there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that you can start at the very at the very core I mean again there's a big wholesale event so you're always going to have your bread and butter transport and transit services and I guess probably what's going on there they're getting less granular you know 10G is becoming 100G 100G is becoming 400G and then in some really big time transactions you've got more fractions of a I don't mean entire fiber or even building up new fiber but then you go the other way down the value chain we're on the enterprise side or you know this whole wholesale ecosystem again that Jezebel was alluding to of you know you have maybe 80% of the customers locations you can service with your own network but nobody has ubiquitous network that other 20% or whatever it is you have to go elsewhere to with partner networks to achieve that and a lot of the way that works now by default is with you know kind of a VPN and using local access from some other carrier and and kind of terminating the VPN service on a partner network but that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved and in some cases even private lines you know for you know say for for example directly to cloud providers are in the mix as well so that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these you know VPN defaults you know are no longer well the VPNs are no longer the default option you know so we have some the market's kind of influx you know with those choices but but you still have that fundamental you know need to to partner with other networks so it'll be really interesting see how that involves as the service mix evolves as the as a technology available changes and yeah to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over a global network yeah absolutely we all need each other that is definitely one of the core messages here and one of the reasons why capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all as capacity Europe being Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth that it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in West Canada so that all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with the global global growth in international bandwidth and yeah in terms of the the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these interconnections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoy you will be joined by executives from equinex Uber Deutsche telecom talk talk wholesale service Palo Alto innovation advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important to for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements and cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extending Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but but certainly you know in parts of this business where you know there's not a lot of margin to to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently and as as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these aren't new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be a big part of that and we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it Jezebel let's talk a bit about interoperability how do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces well there's lots of different types of interoperability as networks we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another right so the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well beyond technology there's a ton of complexities right that there's commercial relationships there's software if you're actually doing automation how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another you need to have some sort of standardization translation to be able to move to speak everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move the things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment and beyond the technology right beyond the software technologies of the infrastructure technology and the software technology there's also the business terms right we need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who's used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage no network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network there's just not enough capital to invest in that so all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth Hello everybody welcome back to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we are covering the latest stories trends and innovations and the global digital infrastructure and connectivity markets we're very excited today to join you from capacity Europe live from London here to chat with Dylan Carver so you're working strategic sales with Afrix Telecom yeah and so we chatted with you back at ITW I believe and so we're going to get an update about the latest with Afrix Telecom now so welcome to JSA TV first of all thank you very much Kines I'm really happy to be here yeah I'm really happy that you had the time to join us today so let's jump right into it so of course fiber optic expansion in Africa is a really crucial initiative so if you could just start off by telling us your kind of ongoing plans to work with operators to set them up with last mile access sure Kines yeah West Africa it comes back to the 2010 years when ACE came and into actually West Africa a World Bank initiative that had a purpose to allow the private ISP ecosystem in each of those landings to basically have access to the World Wide Web without going through the incumbents cables and it gave us a launchpad to basically get introduced ourselves to the ecosystem and develop the data economy excellent awesome and so you talked a little bit about ACE already submarine cable so is there anything else you want to add there so yeah Kines so the ACE system is a very complex system it's starting from Europe namely France and Portugal and then it trickles down all the way to Cape Town in four segments one segment segment number one Europe all the way to Dakar segment three all the way to Abidjan segment four France Automate to Cape Town what happens is that we realize that by playing the partners that had capacity access on that system it allowed us to integrate a network with the network flew the ACE as a backbone and that gave us a legitimate credible purpose to introduce ourselves to the tier ones tell them hang on guys we can actually terminate solutions for your and corporate national international sites antennas and we can do it in all West Africa thanks to ACE and then the externalities built on the relationship with those ACE folks and now we going into Southern Africa Eastern Africa Northern Africa and we're doing a Pan-African one-stop shop thanks to ACE it allowed us to create a one service provider for a unique SLA standard wherever in Africa excellent yeah it seems really fast growing you've got a lot on the move right now with Africa Telecom yeah so we came into the market with ACE and the ecosystem today we went from that partnership business model that is very least orientated buy and sell orientated to actually harnessing local footprint ISP ownership and right now we are print out of 10 markets namely all the landlock West African places such as Niger Mali Burkina Faso but also Cameroon DRC South Africa and now Kenya so you can see that our trajectory is very very scaling up itself based on how we see the market and echoing it with an equally dynamic let's say growth yeah absolutely yeah well thank you for sharing that with us that's a great really excellent update it's things are moving so quickly that even since ITW you know there's been a lot of development and so speaking of if we could kind of you know look at the crystal ball a little bit over the next five to 10 years what do you where do you kind of see the evolution of last mile access in Africa so one friend of mine told me the data is king content is King Kong that means looking at this analogy that is that is very meaning anything and nothing at the same time is that the the growth of the infrastructure ecosystem driven by the CDN is going to revamp and reshape the way operators interact to each other and we as Africa have built a business unit based on infra and data center and we're trying to converge this under the Africa's brand so we've got Medusa in North Africa we've got the Barcelona landing station as a neutral open access data center eliminating the backhoe fees in order to streamline content back and forth from a CLS terrestrial and wet submarine segment what we see is that we need to be responding to the growth of capacity under the water with new cable such as a channel and to Africa and be able to respond adequately to our customer base that is current by following the price trend that is more and more let's say in the reducing line but also scale ourselves closer to the end customer because we need to have more operations that can sustain the easiness of getting accesses on those sub segments so yeah following the content that's Africa's motto today all right following the content you heard it here first okay so I think you know we could definitely chat about this many many more hours probably and I'm happy to do that if you want to hopefully this this got you excited about what AFRIC telecom is doing and you can go check out their website and reach out to Dylan if you have any questions Dylan thank you so much for joining us Chinese it's a pleasure and thank you to have me for a second round yeah absolutely okay and then thank you to our viewers as well unless round of thank yous for joining us here on JSA TV as always happy networking bye bye what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all this is capacity Europe and Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in the West Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with global global growth in international bandwidth yeah in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will go to other regions some of those they'll continue to serve out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on out of Europe center and that really takes us to another hot topic network advancement we're talking these into connections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoyed you'll be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telecom, TalkTalk, Wholesale Service Palo Alto, Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements and cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extending to Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that we'll take note that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but certainly you know in parts of this business where you know there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently and as as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for those alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these are new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be and we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it Jezebel let's talk a bit about interoperability how do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces well there's interoperability as networks we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another right so the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well beyond technology there's a ton of complexities right that there's commercial relationships there's software if you're actually doing automation how are you moving packets in the software layer from one place to another you need to have some sort of standardization translation to be able to move to speak everybody have to speak the same language to be able to move things from one place to another and to have a ubiquitous environment and beyond the technology right beyond the software technologies of the infrastructure technology and the software technology there's also the business terms right we need to align the business terms for the different service providers so that their customer who's used to be consuming service in a particular fashion can continue to consume that service in a particular fashion but in a different area where the network that they're working with does not have current coverage no network can have global ubiquitous coverage in their own network there's just not enough capital to invest in that so all of the networks really need to work together and collaborate to bring a ubiquitous smooth and pleasant experience to the enterprise customer base and that is what the enterprise customers are looking for that's right so right well said all right so Eric with everything we just discussed how do you see the service mix evolving well there's you know there's a lot of different services kind of up and down the value chain and we covered a good portion of that you can start at the very at the very core I mean again it's a big wholesale event so you're always going to have your bread and butter transport and transit services and I guess you know part of what's going on there they're they're getting you know less granular you know 10 g is becoming 100 g 100 g is becoming 400 g and then in some really big time transactions you've got more fractions of a I don't mean entire fiber or even building up new fiber but then you go the other way down the value chain we're on the enterprise side or or you know this whole wholesale ecosystem again that Jezebel was alluding to of you know you have maybe 80 percent of the customer's locations you can service with your own network but nobody has a ubiquitous network that other 20 percent or whatever it is you have to go elsewhere to with partner networks to achieve that and a lot of the way that works now by default is with you know kind of a VPN and using a local access from some other carrier and and and kind of terminated the VPN service on a partner network but that's no longer the default option with new technologies that are available that there's more internet involved and in some cases even private lines you know for you know say for for example directly to cloud providers are in the mix as well so that service mix is really evolving and it creates some really interesting opportunities for automation and I guess expedited delivery of those services since these you know VPN defaults you know are no longer well the VPNs are no longer the default option you know so we have some the market's kind of influx you know with those choices but but you still have that fundamental you know need to to partner with other networks so it'll be really interesting see how that involves as the service mix evolves as the as a technology available changes and yeah to ultimately accomplish the same goal which is to interconnect all the end users seamlessly over yeah absolutely we all need each other that is definitely one of the core messages here and one of the reasons why capacity Europe is happening at a very critical time what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all as capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35% only 35% if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41% so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with the global growth in international bandwidth and yeah in terms of the the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will go to other regions but some of those will continue sir out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on out of Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these into connections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be you'll be joined by executives from Equinex Uber Deutsche Telekom Talk Talk Wholesale Service Palo Alto Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts where we're covering the latest stories news and innovation coming to you from leaders in global connectivity and digital infrastructure I'm Barb Mitchell and I'm pleased to be joined here today with Yasutaka Mizu global CMO of Colt Technology what a pleasure to have you thank you for having me yeah and I'm really pleased to go through the session with you absolutely I'm so excited and and you I know have a session I think you're focusing on a lot of your conversation right now is around preparing for AI preparing for that AI revolution we should we should say and so can you just let's start there if you don't mind dive right in to the good stuff a lot of people are talking about this but but can you just give us some what you may focus on for that conversation are we ready for AI and so are we I guess is the question yeah it was one of our key questions which was brought up in a panel discussion we had earlier today yeah and I basically answered that question by saying a massive yes because we don't even realize but for example Microsoft is going to introduce co-pilot on their Microsoft Azure and also Microsoft 365 on from November so a lot of companies and also a lot of individuals will start using AI functions along with the business applications and we can't really tell which part is actually done by AI and which part is actually done by human as well so whether or not we are ready we will have to go and cope with that as well and I think we cold technology services have been using AI and machine learning from quite some time ago and we actually introduced it about three years ago in order to understand our customers by leveraging the technology interesting yeah that's so interesting I mean I think so many people now are sitting back some a little scared I think and some you know just curious you know about what the future holds but as you said and we were chatting earlier I mean you've been leveraging tools for AI for quite some time now and so what plans do you have to continue that to to aid your business but others your partners and customers right yeah it's actually embedded quite heavily in our business already so day to day your operation is based on a lot of machine learning technology that we've already deployed so we used machine learning technology to understand intent of the customers so we roughly can understand what customers are interested in so before even we engage with the customers we can have preconception of what they may be interested in which actually helped to boost the pipeline by 120% as well so it's just one of the examples but if we use the AI in the in the right direction we can actually not only boost the productivity but also boost the customer experience and their satisfaction overall as well yeah so interesting I mean the the applications are endless aren't they and and can be can be used in such a powerful way so that's great thanks for that that bit of insight there on how you're already doing that and so but outside of the world of AI lots happens I think all the time with with Colt but tell us about this week's announcement right so I'm really excited to talk through this because it came out yesterday and we expanded our network in France especially in three cities in France we already had coverage in Paris and Lyon and some other areas as well but we extended our our coverage into Bordeaux into Toulouse and to Lille as well and we are basically covering most of the major cities across France and also connecting those cities to the rest of the world as well yeah amazing yeah that's it was great to see that news come out and as I like I said it's always good there's always it feels like something happening and on that note your role you're leading global marketing for Colts as CMO and and so I'm sure you're already starting to think about your plans going into 2024 is there anything you might be able to give us a little sneak peek into sort of what's in store absolutely I think we we are going to double down on the use of the science-based sort of understanding of our customers and our business we've already built our data lake and we started to apply AI and machine learning technology to even understand our customers better we actually introduced this during the COVID right so we were able to tell which customers are needing more bandwidth and also we were able to tell which customers are sort of struggling in that situation as well so we have been able to offer flexible payment services in a proactive way and after going through the pandemic they actually ramped up their business again to probably better than where they used to be and they are now coming back to us for to tell us that we were the only company that helped them in a proactive way whilst they were having a hard time as well so it really depends how we apply AI to make our business better and probably one of the really interesting application of AI is really to build intent-based network which means we can choose to connect certain destination by choosing a specific path for example greener path where CO2 sort of a consumption is lower in specific countries or areas as well so we've started to look into that with with the rest of the company as well and it's not something that we can do it just on our self so we are working with other partners to really build this together so that we can make this better world that we can live as well yeah that's amazing to hear and you're I mean I completely agree it's it's the global ecosystem of partners and people working together towards a future that you know we all want to share so so thank you for that and you know we're we're still it's feels like it's been a long first day but it is still the first day and so you know what are you most looking forward to for the remainder of the show this week it's absolutely the partnering opportunities yeah across all over the world we see customers and partners from completely different part of the world I think the number of international travelers have increased this year so I'm really hoping to interact with many of those people from different part of the world so that's we can start building partnership and strengthen it with the existing partners as well yeah fantastic and so for anyone while you're still at the show is there a way that people can connect with you and your team and then you know after capacity Europe is over and everyone's gone back to their respective homes how can they find you yeah we have a room upstairs okay and you can find it from the app yes which is really useful as well and you can actually get to choose who you want to meet within cult as well we have more than 50 sort of I'm representative from us as well so you can choose anybody including myself and just book our time so that we can meet and start discussion as well fantastic thank you so much music thank you thank you for joining us I really appreciate your time and your insights here today my pleasure thank you for helping me of course yeah thank you and thank you viewers for tuning in again to JSA TV and JSA podcasts until next time happy networking what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all as capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in West Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent you know only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with the global global growth in international bandwidth and yeah in terms of the the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will they will go to other regions some of those they'll continue sir out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on kind of Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these into connections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoy you'll be joined by executives from Equinex Uber Deutsche Telecom Talk Talk Wholesale Service Palo Alto Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this type of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now and in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but but certainly you know in parts of this business where you know there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently as well as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these are new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be and we're hinting about it so let's go ahead and talk about it Jezebel let's talk a bit about interoperability how do network operators ensure those network advancements across country borders and through partner network interfaces well there's lots of different types of interoperability as networks we've always had interoperability because you have to be able to pass packets from one place to another right so the technologies already exist on the physical layer we do pack packets easily but when when it comes to interoperability Eric said it well beyond technology there's a ton of complexities right that there's commercial relationships there's software hello everyone welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we are covering the latest stories trends and innovations with leaders like Selene from the digital infrastructure industry I'm Candice Sipos with JSA and I'm very excited to introduce you all to Selene Osalski she is a Chief Sales and Marketing Officer with Yellow we're happy to have you here Selene thank you thank you for joining us on JSA TV yes thanks thanks for receiving me here yeah absolutely all right so we'll go ahead and jump right in so since you this is your first time on JSA TV we thought it would be good for you to give our audience a little background on on yellow so if you you all enable connectivity in over 120 urban areas and 3000 municipalities so can you start by just sharing a little bit about what your infrastructure to support you know that much demand and that much reach really looks like yes indeed well yellow is a telco infrastructure operator a French telco infrastructure operator that designs, deploys and operates internally its own infrastructure we have been created in 9th in 2016 by French entrepreneurs and we have a very important acceleration we have a fundraising in 2020 that allows us to deploy over three years more than 30,000 kilometers of metropolitan fiber and more than 11,000 kilometers of long-haul fibers this means that today we have the largest wholesale dedicated network to B2B activity we provide the carriers the French and international carriers in France with backbone and access services infrastructure and this means that we offer them wavelengths but also dark fiber from metropolitan and long-haul but also access with DIA excellent perfect well thank you so much for that intro you all have been around since 2016 but you got that fundraising round in 2020 so that it really accelerated the business and since then it's just been upward trajectory lots of growth so your customers are like you were saying global carriers with B2B connectivity and needs in France so could you talk a little bit about their expectations and how you all support them well they come to us well we have more than 13 international carriers partners and more than several hundreds of French carriers also and they really come to us because they want to rely on us they are really looking for trust for trust and they want to rely on a partnership on which they can outsource really the infrastructure activity and build their own business on top of our infrastructure that's really their expectations and here in Capacity we have the opportunity to exchange with them that's a really amazing opportunity for us but also to draw the future and see how we can well serve them for the future excellent thank you so much and so we'll just go ahead and look right into next year already we're very forward facing in this industry I feel like so what do you see on the horizon for your team and just the industry in general any trends do you want to talk about well on our specific French industry which is not for example the global one we are looking for a really premium service I mean in France we have a lot of offers and a lot of fiber services but these infrastructures are not always premium and our partners are really looking for very qualitative service they are looking also for coverage we're covering today 80% of the large and medium companies in France so that's really interesting for them and well they're also facing the evolution of copper to fiber and the ending of copper and that's really a very large well stick for them for 2024 excellent well lots of lots of work has already been done lots more work to do and that transition to fiber right so that's very exciting for yellow being a part of that trend so I think that's unfortunately all we have time for today but we'd love to chat further I'm sure we'll have yellow back on JSA TV so thank you so much for joining us thank you for your intention and thank you for this challenge oh absolutely and thank you to our viewers for hanging out with us here on JSA TV we will be back in a few minutes and also here all morning tomorrow happy networking thank you thank you what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all this is capacity Europe and Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in Western Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent you know only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's Law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with the global global growth in international bandwidth and yeah in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that expand to other regions some of that they will go to other regions but some of those they'll continue sir out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on out of Europe center and that really takes us to the another hot topic network advancement we're talking these into connections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoyed you'll be joined by executives from Equinex Uber Deutsche Telekom Talk Talk Wholesale Service Palo Alto Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this types of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements in cost and performance that this automation can achieve now in the near future what are those improvements if you are yeah well there's certainly a motivation for that I mean you'd like to think you could take for granted you know basic you know inventory management and service delivery but in this business that can be really hard to do and to be fair that's hard to do because some of these networks are sort of have legacies extended by Alexander Graham Bell I mean there's a lot going on there and it's a lot to manage and then you want to try and modernize all that while taking all that with you so there's a lot of work to be done there but certainly in parts of this business where there's not a lot of margin to provide some basic connectivity services you'd like to do that as efficiently and as automated as possible but as if the technical challenges weren't hard enough you also have all the commercial arrangements that you have to bring along with that you know everybody wants to be special and get the best deal and you know this is capacity Europe it's a big part of what goes on there is so can you automate you know a protracted negotiation for connectivity and extend that as Jezebel was alluding to across networks across borders and assure that you know service from end to end and these aren't new issues you know this is a big deal but automation can certainly be a welcome everyone to JSA TV and JSA podcasts where we're covering the latest stories news trends innovations from leaders across the global connectivity and digital infrastructure space I'm Barb Mitchell from JSA and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Emmanuel Rocha CEO of Orange or Orange whichever country you happen to be in and say it either Orange yes thank you so nice to meet you nice to meet you again I know it's been yep we we last spoke it's been a year already and we spoke last year at capacity Europe and I know a lot happens in the course of a year but most significantly today you had some exciting news come out can you share that with us yes actually this morning we revealed a new brand for our world selectivities which is Orange wholesale it's you know it's the continuity of the new strategy that Orange announced in in April this year with a clear focus on wholesale as a key pillar for the group growth and revenues and and a key focus also on capitalizing on our existing infrastructure and developing more infrastructure so this has translated into a new organization that was put in place in April which is Orange wholesale it's a division which is gathering into one organization with one boss which is sitting in the group executive committee and this organization gathered the the domestic wholesale activities in France the international wholesale and also the the totem totem which is our our tower call and also Orange marine it's our our fleets our our a cable ship fleet so that's a new organization and now we have a new brand this this brand is is intended to well to show the power of Orange in this market of a wholesale and wholesale market and also leverage on all our our existing assets and be able to invest more and and show to the market what that we are one single activity around wholesale at Orange it feels like a very pivotal time to be speaking with you about this that's a fairly major announcement I think and and so important for your organization globally but also important I think for the customers that you serve and so one of the things that is spoken of a lot in our industry is the idea of network as a service and so can you speak to that and and your sort of your perspective on that yeah that's one of the of the key element of the of the promise of the Orange wholesale brand is to to provide services on demand to our customers which means that we want to to transform our current customer experience with wholesale connectivity into something which is more like what you have with our customers experience with the cloud which that's a very important and very transformative strategy because it it first goes through our network transformation so we are currently at international level completely rush offing our international networks in order to make them more virtualized more layered so having an infrastructure layer transmission layer service layer an orchestration layer those different layers are fully independent one from the other so enabling to do a very innovative models in terms of wholesale so poor having some external services working and running on our telco cloud or or a telco infrastructure or bringing our services on another's infrastructure or a transmission network so that's really a key element network transformation and the other element that we need to transform is our customer relationship we are digitizing and automating as much as possible what we offer to our customers so having porting our offers to the web and also through APIs for our customers and this is now we have four or five offers which are available fully online fully on demand and it's going from IP transit to EVPL cloud numbers and very soon CDM so you I mean it here we I mean we're it's October almost the end of October so we're getting close to rounding out this year 2023 a lot of major things have happened for you already this year and whether that be you know the new announcement that you made today with with your orange wholesale but also with some of the solutions that you offer but when you look even further ahead now as if you know it's we never like to just rest for too long right what's next what's what's coming up that's exciting that you may be ready to share with us yeah well actually we have two two key areas which are very exciting one is on the service side we are we have launched three three weeks ago a new CDN offer on the market which is a a trusted CDN offer European with a managed by a European player orange based on the European technology with all the the data hosted in in the European Union and this well this is the beginning of the story so we have launched this this offer now we have we have deployed it in in France mainly and we're starting in in Q4 this year to to deploy it in Africa in the Middle East and then probably in Asia and America's so next year will be really the year where we will see this offer anchor into the market and get attraction so that's the first one and the second one is about infrastructure I mentioned that orange wholesale has been created to to capitalize on the orange infrastructure and also develop them and we are now we have a lot of interesting projects to develop new infrastructure some marine cables but also terrestrial projects in Europe and also working with the satellite players in order to be I would say under the sea on the on the terrestrial and in the sky oh interesting yeah real global push right a lot of global solutions and infrastructure and so you're here for the rest of the week and for people that want to maybe catch up with you and hear a little bit more about what we've been talking about or some of the other things that you're working on how can they find you oh it's it's easy we have orange has a a room a meeting room which is on the second floor so you can come and and see us there is always somebody to to welcome you so I would be very happy to to talk with all the customers partners that we have in the marketplace amazing thank you so great to chat with you again look forward to hopefully it's not a whole another year before we we talk again but but if it is we look forward to seeing what happens in in this upcoming year so so thank you thank you for joining us and thank you viewers for tuning in to jsa tv and jsa podcasts that's it for today we'll be back again tomorrow with more news and updates for you on jsa tv live here at capacity Europe 2023 happy networking what do you see as a digital hub for Europe and where do you see hyperscalers fitting into this yeah well Europe I mean first of all this capacity Europe in Europe is one of the biggest bandwidth markets in the world it's actually the biggest in terms of just primary regions and several reasons for that one of which is certainly the hyperscalers but part of it's just lots of borders in terms of international bandwidth but it also serves as a hub for itself as well as other regions particularly Africa and Middle East that are quite dependent on Europe for exchanging traffic and that role continues for all network operators hyperscalers included but also you also have this massive connection with North America a lot of it through the United States to interconnect all the huge facilities in Europe and in West Canada so it all adds up to a huge market that is still growing even though it's a very mature market it's growing up in the last year it was about 35 percent only 35 percent if you take that back about four years compounded annually it's about 41 percent so still at that Moore's law kind of doubling every year type of growth so that's a lot of growth and that aligns pretty well with the global global growth in international bandwidth yeah in terms of the hyperscaler portion of that I mean they're doing a couple things they have some of their their biggest facilities are in Europe and they're kind of augmenting that they're kind of doubling down on that but they're also augmenting that to expand to other regions some of that they will they will go to other regions but some of those they'll continue to serve out of Europe so you have all the connectivity following on with that and diversifying all that connectivity as well finding you still have the traditional hubs but you sort of have you want some diversification around those moving to some other ones as well so lots of things going on out of Europe center and that really takes us to another hot topic network advancement we're talking these interconnections global growth expansions so network advancement absolutely on the minds of many of course Jezebel you will be a featured speaker on day one at Capacity Europe on a panel that's really exploring the potential of fully automated networks as you mentioned earlier and of course you'll be enjoyed you will be joined by executives from Equinex, Uber, Deutsche Telekom TalkTalk, Wholesale Service Palo Alto Innovation Advisors so quite the lineup of thought leaders there can you give us a preview of some of the potential key takeaways you may think will come from this panel absolutely as you know that there are many industry leaders on the panel who have built fully automated networks you know in in their region were their footprint right but is there a key focus area for anyone who's interested in building automation into their network and what's the benefit you know from having someone like Uber on the panel that's really the consumer the customer's perspective right in saying hey we are the consumer of this type of service what's important to us you know what does it matter why does it matter and what is important for you to build that would attract us to come to consume in the fully automated fashion and are we interested in particular type of SLA you know a quality of service or what are the drivers the motivation for us what are the challenges that one had gone through in building a fully automated network but lastly you know what really near and dear to my heart is how do we bring everyone into the platform where a fully automated session can happen across the world so there's ubiquitous access through this type of automation for everyone because it's if it only reaches part of the world that you're trying to get to having it fully automated it's not enough are you seeing improvements in cost and performance hi everyone I'm barb Mitchell joined with Candice Sipos here from JSA wrapping up day one here at Capacity Europe at the O2 in London it's been a great first day wouldn't you say Candice? it really has been we're in this beautiful new space the peninsula ballroom I believe is what it's called so it didn't even exist last year we've been at JSA we've been in Capacity Europe several years in a row so this is an annual tradition for us but new space so that kind of shakes it up a little bit and it's also it feels very kind of executive and quieter down here in the Peninsula area and then it's very busy and buzzing we have had just a few minutes to kind of run upstairs in between interviews here and there and it's very expo floor upstairs so it's hard to imagine that they can expand into a whole another space and it's still be full and as busy as this space is absolutely yeah it's definitely been quite busy we've been really excited to host so many of the carriers that are here at Capacity Europe as well as you know as service providers who are serving those carriers all kinds of different folks from different areas within digital infrastructure so what do you what do you think Barb what was the different areas geographically and areas in terms of focus of business you said carriers we had yeah we had Colts we had orange here we also talked to some data center providers and some folks that are building out infrastructure in areas like Africa so IX Africa was one that we spoke with yeah really interesting and some key themes came up don't you think yeah absolutely we've we were Barb and I were just chatting about kind of the power of partnership being a big headline we feel like from the interviews we're we're having but also just generally from what people are talking about around the conference so yeah I mean I think the correct me if I'm wrong but I think what I was hearing some of the themes we've been hearing about throughout the year and probably the year before sustainability continues to be on everyone's mind but also a lot around artificial intelligence yeah and again it was last year too but this year even more so right I had someone say to me that last year they were talking about the metaverse and this year it's more about specifically around AI several people were talking about that but I think you mentioned partnerships and one of the things that really stood out to me was just again this emphasis on the need for the global community to come together to enable the the infrastructure build outs and and support the networks to have this global connectivity that's going to support the needs of clients and partnerships and and organizations absolutely I feel like a lot the underlying theme of a lot of these conversations is just the demands like the intense demand that the industry is seeing and and we'll continue to see because of AI and these intense workloads and so how do we tackle that together I think is one common theme and then also how do we generate the interest in the industry and you know have enough people to tackle that just the workforce conversations I feel like especially over the past year this year I feel like those have really been front and center at these conferences not just this one but certainly I think this morning capacity year I've opened with a big roundtable discussion with a lot of really you know insightful thoughts around how to solve that issue with the workforce so so interesting and it's hard to stop talking because there's so much to say we'll have more to to say later we're going to continue the conversations there's a networking reception I know that starts shortly here where we can continue the conversations we've been having with some folks on JSA TV and we'll take it sort of behind the behind the scenes and and we'll have more to say tomorrow because we start live again tomorrow at 9 a.m. local time that's like live 9 a.m. British standard time that's right yeah so bright and early for everyone else hopefully watching from from the US and other areas of the world depending on where you are of course you know but if you're here if you're watching live and you're in UK time actually I think we're starting at 8 50 even because we snuck another 10 minutes earlier yeah we're we're getting so much demand for these interviews so we're kind of sneaking them in where we can so we will see you there yeah okay great well thank you can't and thank you viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcast we'll be back again tomorrow and until then have a great night happy networking we'll see you soon