 It's a big event for the community. It's a great networking framework for all of us and I extremely appreciate the opportunity to have this whole colleagues and partners and stakeholders in the community together and this year we have identified more than ever how important also in-person meetings are after being locked down for almost two years. We are at the beginning of a new decade if it comes to the industry development and exciting times ahead of us having the digital transformation everywhere for everyone and everybody this will change our industry as well. We're happy to be here in Capacity Europe, to be again here and meet the industry and we are going every year because for us it's really big events meeting all of our partners across the carrier industry and other industry as well as technology partners meeting here and one when you which helps us very much to bring all the energy together to face all the challenges and to face all the business opportunities that the market is bringing to us. It's a great pleasure to be part of Capacity Europe 2021. A true partner of choice and looking forward for the future success. It's a fantastic place to meet customers, partners and essentially connect with the ecosystem. If we're not all successful, no one is. I think we'll increase the way we co-create together. I think the importance of igniting end user, be it consumer or enterprise experience has become more important and I think ultimately because we need to propel more growth. So I'll see you at Capacity 2022. And see you at Capacity Europe 2022. We'll see you at Capacity Europe 2022. I think there are an awful lot of events on the calendar. It's a bit of a jamboree but I think the Global Carrier Awards stand out. The Capacity Events stand out. I'm looking forward to Network because a lot of people know what's going on around and the rest of the world from partners, from other operators, from our customers. Tonight this is the place to be in telecoms. Recognize the best global and regional carriers, projects, marketing and sales teams, campaigns, disruptors and innovations. You know, really genuinely pretty products. A new world category and I think it's brilliant for you and I'm really, really happy for you. I'm very honored and delighted to be part of this great group of companies and we want to meet some more. Congratulations to everyone. I hope you had a wonderful evening. Thank you. Welcome to Capacity Europe 2022 pre-event coverage. We are looking forward to delivering this year's equally anticipated blended event on the 18th to the 24th of October at the Intercontinental London DO2 and also on the Spotcard app. I'm David Tran, Comprehensive Producer Lead of this year's event and in the run-up to the event we'll have a series of rather light-hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes with tackling to industry views but also bring out the person behind the speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in Five Minutes with, I have Eric Sieves, President, Global Wholesale of Verizon Partner Solutions. Eric, first of all, great to have you involved and great to have you speaking at this year's event. Ready for a quick five, five minute with informal... Welcome to Capacity Europe Extra, powered by JSA, the live streaming newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today live from day three, our final day here at Capacity Europe in London. It's been a busy and successful week for many and I'm excited to hear more about that from our first guest this morning, Karl Roberts. Sorry, excuse me, Karl Roberts, partner at Hadara and it's such a pleasure to have you here bright and early this morning. Well, thank you for inviting me, Barb. It's great to be here and bright and early, early yes. I'm not sure about bright because it was a long night last night. And what a great night. It was the Global Carrier Awards event last night and Karl, you were emcee facilitating the entire event and I was there in person and there were so many great moments, so many great entries for the awards. Tell us a little bit about what that was like for you. Well, it was, you know, it's a moment that you wait for, I mean, we started at the end of March with the whole process. So it takes a lot of work in the background, getting all the submissions in, answering the questions of everybody who wanted to put in, you know, does this fit that category or the other category. And then it accelerates towards the summer where we close the portal, engage the judges in the judging process and they kind of go into lockdown for about three weeks and then we get the shortlist and then we identify the tiebreaker situations and given the quality that we have and the competitiveness of all the entrants, you know, this year we had six tiebreaker situations. However, some of those were, you know, three and four-way tiebreakers and that's hard to do. So the judging process is really quite difficult. And then when we get to the end of that, then it's preparing for the event and the event is a fantastic coming together of the industry because people often ask, well, you know, what are these events all about? And it's about celebrating the great things our industry does. And if we don't take this time out just to think about it and to acknowledge those people who are really moving the needle, then that would be a huge missed opportunity for the industry. And I think for all those who are working to drive the industry forward, it's a really appropriate recognition of all of that. You can really feel it, you know, leading up to the event, all of Capacity Europe, but then sort of the culmination of that in the awards and the work that goes into it, I completely agree. People, just to be on the shortlist is such an honor for anyone that was there last night or even those who couldn't make it. You know, I know that it's a lot of hard work recognized and it's nice to hear. I don't know that everyone is aware of the amount of work that entails for the judging panel and all of the consideration that needs to... There are a lot of judges, aren't there? How many on the panel? Well, we had 22 judges and they each had about, on average, 26 entries to go through. So if you think that at least an hour for each entry, that's 26 hours worth of work, and it's not that you get it in the first shot because I know I've been a judge myself before being chairman of the panel of judges, you go through and then you come back and I know all the judges are really top, top people, serious people who want to get to the right result. So they will go back and they'll make sure they're doing right by every single contestant. And it's just the judging is between the judge and the entry. There is no external interference. There is no discussion between judges. So you really get a straight view of this from the top professionals in our industry. And that's what makes it so authentic. It truly is one that is not polluted by any commercial considerations. Okay, some people say, oh, you know, you pay to win. That is absolutely not the case here. From the day that I accept to be chairman and I work with Philippa, who you saw, who does all the organizing of this, nobody else talks to me, nobody from any commercial team. I don't know who's sponsoring, I don't care who's sponsoring and the same thing with the judges. So this is really a straight, straight evaluation. That's it's so interesting to hear that. And I think so important, you know, for our viewers and it really it's part of what sets, you know, capacity Europe, but the Global Carrier Awards really, you know, sets them apart, right, as the real pinnacle. You know, any of the folks, as I said to begin, any of the folks who are shortlisted or win can be so proud of the work that they've done because it's really the end. And I think we should thank the judges. What a huge huge kudos for this. But also, you know, everybody who makes a submission, you can see that there's a lot of effort going into it. And you recognize and it's actually what makes you very proud to still be part of this industry. You see the fabulous things that everybody's doing and it's very uplifting. It really is uplifting. And I mentioned last night, you know, 12 months ago, we're talking about COVID, how the industry pulled together to help the planet keep functioning. And this year, dealing with the Ukrainian crisis, again, people forget that we're competitors. You know, what can we do to help these people? And I think that's something that's really very unique to our industry. And as you saw last night, you know, we're a big global industry, but it's a village. It really is a people business. I've been hearing that so consistently all week from folks. There's a lot of work to be done in the industry, a lot of opportunity and a lot of work that comes with that. And also, things like, you know, the crisis in the Ukraine and and other things, you know, you had TSF was on stage last night. We love to hear from them and the work that's being done. But aside from that, just coming together here at this event, you know, people are really talking about just the energy that comes from that to be back in person and seeing one another. What's your feel been so far this week on that front so far, whereas we're wrapping up? Well, yeah, I mean, as usual, it's a couple of days, but they're really exhausting. There's been a superb buzz from the beginning of day one. So many people here, everybody catching up. And I think what's different from years gone by is that and it started last year, even more so this year, all the discussions are very meaningful business discussions. I think at one point in time, people were just catching up about how you're watching you in the zoo. But now it's really much. Yeah, people are friends, of course, but there's much more business content and more decisive outcomes come from the meetings. I mean, I've been sitting in the GF community lounge and, you know, a lot of the key players are in and out of there. So it's a great place for me to be, of course. And you see the business deals that are being discussed. So it's not just catching up. It's about really getting to concrete outcomes. And that's been great. But also, there's been a fantastic buzz. There's a buzz last night. And one of the high points I think was and a call out to my dear friend, Mr. Ali Amiri, who got the second ever lifetime achievement award to a standing of a spontaneous standing ovation. That was a big moment, actually. And I thought it was great. And that was a big family moment because everybody's known Ali forever. And they all love him. And you could just feel that on stage. It was it was terrific. That was a nice moment. And yeah, and no one wanted to sit back down after that. It was the ovation kept on going. But so on that note, just in terms of business conversations, I want to take a moment to talk about what you're doing professionally and Hadar consulting and the work and what are some of your priorities and things that you may want to highlight for us here. Okay, well, you know, Hadar has been going since 2015 now, it seems like yesterday, but 2015. And I spent all of my time actually talking with my industry peers and working with them, obviously, confidentially on transformation product projects. There's a lot now of pivoting, as I mentioned last night, moving into new digital products. So for enterprise business, how do you take the traditional enterprise business and take new software offerings and bundles and a new stacks of technology to the enterprise customer? A lot of focus on CPAS right now. And here were the carrier show. So it's about how do we morph from the old wholesale business to a new wholesale business? Because we know that, you know, traditional voice is going down traditional wholesale data, a lot of price pressure there. So how do we reinvent wholesale? And what does it become in the new world? Because it can't be the same as it was in the past. So you've got on parallel planes, evolutions on the carrier wholesale side, on the enterprise side, from a technology standpoint, to a certain extent, there's a coming together of the technological building blocks. And it's really where the where the go to market comes into play, which is, which is really where the difference comes in. And, you know, my missions, advisory missions really, because it's more active than just a consult is to help carriers make those moves, whether organically or in organically, and to help them move to a kind of North star scenario, where you are today, where you aspire to get to, and what are the concrete steps there. And I think the difference with what I do with Hadara, and, you know, I partner with a lot of consulting companies as well in this is to use an old Verizon expression, we wire the solutions to the ground. So it's no ethereal fancy slides with no actions. It goes down to what is literally what is every salesperson have to do every month for the next five years for this plan to come true. And it's not just about sales, about product. It's about how you bring, you know, software into networks, and how you bring orchestration in across the entire portfolio. So it's it's it's fabulous. It's interesting. Everybody's on that journey, large or small. And it's it's complicated. So I enjoy doing that. It allows me to work with the people I've known for years, and help them on their way to the pivot to be positioned for tomorrow. I love that, you know, starting with the vision and then building what are the steps we need to take to actually make this happen. And, you know, we we hear about that we've talked about that from our in ourselves from the sustainability perspective right across the industry. It's one area in in addition to everything else you're saying that it's really about okay putting actions in place to get to where it is we want to go. And I think to your point about sustainability, and you know, thank you for greener data. That's that's absolutely my next read. It is not incompatible with growth. I think for the longest time, people thought, okay, well, that's somebody else's problem tomorrow. Right now, I got to make my numbers, I got to do this. And then this becomes an afterthought. It is not incompatible. And I think the pennies dropped, maybe not everywhere. But it's where we need to get to because, you know, I moderated a fireside chat about the metaverse on day one. When you think of the computing power, and the infrastructure that needs to be put in place to service that, you're generating lots of power, and using lots of resources. And, you know, the way we address that demand, which is going to be huge, is really people need to think about how you do that sustainably. You can, but you need to think about it differently. And there are technologies coming through. And you know, we've seen some of the submissions with the GCAs. And people are thinking about it, especially in the data center arena. I think it's incredible what people are doing there. That needs to be more pervasive across the industry, as we deal with these new challenges. Carl, I feel like we could chat all day. I'll stay if you like. There's so much to talk about it. And I really appreciate you coming. I know it was a busy long night, and it's been a long week. And so we appreciate you coming here. My great pleasure. Thank you so much. It's a great way to start my day. And thank you for inviting me. Anytime. We look forward to the next conversation. And maybe you'll be a next chapter in our next book. We'll see. We'll see. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to Capacity Europe, extra powered by JSA, as we're streaming live here from the exhibit hall floor at the Intercontinental at the O2 in London. Stay tuned for more live streaming interviews as the day goes on. And welcome to Capacity Europe's 2022 pre-event coverage. We are looking forward to delivering this year's eagerly anticipated blended event on the 18th to the 24th of October at the Intercontinental London the O2 and also on the SWAT Carder app. I'm David Tran, conference producer lead of this year's event. And in the run up to the event, we'll have a series of rather light hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes with tapping into industry views, but also bring out the personal client speakers that will be taking part this year's event. Here in Five Minutes with, I have Eric Seavis, president global wholesale of Verizon Partner Solutions. Eric, first of all, great to have you involved and great to have you speaking at this year's event. Ready for a quick five, five minute with informal interview? Absolutely. Looking forward to it. I'm glad to participate and support the Capacity Europe event. You know, Verizon, we like to show up each year and support the event, so glad to do this for you. Great, great to have you in the room as well. We're looking forward to October. All right, let's start the clock. So, Eric, first of all, tell me the cover and state of play situation in global telecoms. I believe that, you know, enterprises around the world are kind of looking for what we call global simple and secure solutions at the end of the day. And we see this as an incredible opportunity for global telecom providers in the industry. If we look at our assets, regardless of what's going on in kind of the economic and geopolitical vein, this is just a great opportunity for us once again to deliver things into the business and to the industry. So, global, simple, secure, that's the way the solutions need to go, whether it's network, whether it's above the network, wire line and wireless services. It's staff. And where would you say your organization is positioned at the moment? I mean, we've seen these shifts, obviously, with the post-COVID take place, but also digital transformation really kind of gathering momentum within the industry. But also, there's also a turbulent economic and inflationary climate as well. Where do you see your organization's position? If I look at my Verizon Partner Solutions Global Wholesale team, we feel we're kind of very excited about the assets that we have. Once again, if we look at what we've done, we spent over $120 billion getting our spectrum with C-Band and millimeter wave. And once again, we've got vast fiber deployments across the footprint right now. So, very strategic time for us, whether it's wire line, wireless, what are we doing from ethernet to wave to internet services, even what I'm doing above the network with BlueJeans conferencing or security services. Or what I really love is the passion we have in the wireless area today with wireless backup or the internet of things, or our own fixed wireless access services that we're doing on LTE business internet. So once again, we think we're very well positioned in the industry. We've made the investments. And once again, we want to help our customers that have big bandwidth requirements. Certainly. And you're very much a familiar face within the industry circles for capacity events. How enjoyable is it working in this industry compared to when you first entered it? Okay, I think you're calling out the fact that I've been doing this for 36 years. Yeah, started back in 1986 and we were doing a lot of dial tone, dial tone, dial tone. But I will tell you, the industry has just transformed tremendously. So from everything we're doing from our digital customer experience transformation, where ease of business is kind of the forefront of what we do at APIs, Candly, what we're doing across the board, we look at new products and services in the industry. The days of just dial tone when today, as I said earlier, I'm selling Ethernet services. I'm selling wave services. We're selling internet services. But above that, we're adding things and partnerships with what we do in the cloud environment, what we're doing with the internet of things. How do we continue to leverage our wireless assets as we look at fixed wireless access and LTE business internet in the industry? Once again, I think it's just a tremendous time, not just selling one or two products and services, but a lot of products and services that deal with our basic telecom needs. So no longer just your basic telco, but this is clearly a technology evolution. And we're stepping up to it, whether it's things we do organically or partnerships that we do in organically to make certain that we can meet the communications need of the industry. Now, we've got 90 seconds left. So I'll have a quick fire kind of questions here. You'll be addressing the talent gap in this year's events as well. What is a state of play? Are we in good shape? Yeah, we feel we're in good shape. Our industry, just like every industry, I think during this period of time. Once again, we're trying to show folks that it's attracted to be in the STEM environment with science and technology and engineering and mathematics. And so once again, even with the GLF, the global leaders forum, we're working on diversity, inclusion and belonging. And one of those initiatives is making sure we're bringing new talent forward and making sure that there are more opportunities with gender and balance, ethnicity and making certain that we have a feeder pool that's ready to take on this telecom industry going forward. So once again, I feel good about the investments, the training and the partnership we're doing with colleges and universities to bring even more talent into the fold. Now, you lead your own organization, Eric, as well, which I'm sure has its own pressures and strains. I mean, did you ever step back and wonder, you know, and how you optimize your own health and wellbeing? Absolutely, step back. I think it's important to sharpen the saw, as we say. Take some time off, reflect, build back that strength and energy and come back even sharper than the day you left. And so, you know, whether I'm taking vacations, you know, two times a year with my wife, or I take the family on vacations, or we attend events, you know, whether it's music events, etc., just taking that time to reflect and enjoy and be thankful for all the blessings. Well, I think that's time's up there, but just one final kind of like quirky question for our viewers that probably have probably yet to see you in person for the very first time at capacity media-related events. But perhaps give our viewers one fun fact that they don't already know. Oh, fun fact, let's see. I just went to the Elton John Farewell Tour Concert at MetLife Stadium in New York. That was pretty cool, and I like cars and clothes, so I don't know if that's three fun facts for you, but hopefully that helps. That was a good lifestyle, really. I was in Jordan as well, yeah. Well, what a great artist as well, so I'm quite envious that you got to put the charts to go and see him live as well. Thanks ever so much, Derek. That was great. Now, Eric will be speaking at capacity Europe. It's October in London. Details of this session will appear in the following closing messages. Bye for now. Welcome to capacity Europe's 2022 pre-event coverage. We're looking forward to delivering this year's eagerly awaited blended event on October the 18th to the 20th at the Intercontinental London EO2 and on the SWAT Card app. I'm David Tran, conference producer, lead of this year's event, and in the run-up to the event, we'll have a series of rather light-hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes With, tapping into their industry views, also bringing out the person behind the speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in Five Minutes With, I have Angela Capone, Vice President of Global Marketing at Edge Connects. Angela, how are you, first of all, and it's great to have you involved in our conference program for this year's event. Ready for a quick five-minute Q&A? Yeah, thank you for inviting me, definitely. Great. Okay, well, certainly, so let's start the clock right now. So in our five-minute Q&A, here we go. Tell me the state of the play in global telecoms. Yeah, I mean, global telecoms isn't just 5G and gigabit telecoms anymore. It's the wider challenges of country regulations, trust from our customers, climate, economic growth, the worrying inflation news that we're seeing, and where to build next. So the balance is getting increasingly difficult with large cloud services requiring ever bigger capacity while also lowering overall emissions across. Welcome to Capacity Europe Extra, powered by JSA, the live streaming newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell joining you here from the exhibit hall live at the Intercontinental at the O2 in London from day three of Capacity Europe, three and a half, I guess, of Capacity Europe. And joining me is Tom Homer, division president for Europe of GTT. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here. It's been a great week so far. It's, you know, we're still going. It's, you know, it's been a full, full week. What's the experience been? You're a local here in London, so everyone's kind of coming to you, which maybe is nice, but what's the week been like for you? Oh, it's been great. It's been a really good, fun week. I think the fact that everybody's back here in real life, better than ever before. That's really good. My office in London, which I'm based at, you know, it's fuller than it's ever been. We've had lots of people coming and going. So it's great to see people in the GTT office as well as here at Capacity. And we're really enjoying it. You know, lots of people on the stand, lots of people talking to us. We've participated in some roundtables. So yeah, it's been great. Yeah. And on that note, you I think on day zero, I'm calling it. So the pre-day, you spoke on a panel talking about the transformation or the move from the telco to techco. And that's really interesting, I think for our viewers to hear more. I'd love them to have the opportunity to hear about what you were speaking about, but also how that applies to the work that you're doing at GTT. Yeah. So GTT are the world's leading provider of managed network services. And we've recently made the shift really from being a telco to being a techco. So I'm sure many of your listeners and watchers will know that GTT recently exited from our infrastructure business. And that deal concluded about a year ago, which takes us back to our roots of being an asset-like managed service provider focused on software, so SD-WAN, security, professional services, and now being able to focus on the customer experience. And so when you're thinking about the conversations that have been coming up this week with folks, are there key themes that you feel are coming through? I mean, are there people focused on some of the same things? Yeah, I mean, for us, we're helping other carrier organizations, both with kind of core Internet connectivity, but also with things like SD-WAN Reach, so white label type services, for them to enable them to get to their customers. We're outperforming the market in terms of our own SD-WAN performance. So we've got lots of carriers and partners that are interested in working with GTT. To help them get better reach and to help them enable to get really a greater share of the market than perhaps they'd be able to get to on their own. And so when you think of the, you sort of have spoken about what's been happening in the, since some of the changes over the last year, but as you look at the road ahead, what are some of your key priorities? If you look into 2023, what will you be sort of doubling down on? Yeah, sure. So, you know, we've made this change from being a telco to starting to be a techco. And if you're a techco, you've got to be absolutely focused on a couple of things. One is customer experience and the other thing is operational excellence. So you have to be able to deliver in a flawless way and you need to be able to deliver, you know, great things for your customers. And it's very difficult to do that when you're acquiring one business a quarter, which is what we were doing, 40 acquisitions over 10 years. So we were really busy doing that. Now we've got time to focus on organic growth. You know, that customer experience, for example, means that we're able to listen to our customers better. We've been investing in customer success managers. We've got over 100 of them around the world to help support our sales team and our service teams to deliver a great experience for customers. And we've also started running regular customer advisory boards. So most recently, we ran a customer advisory board here in Europe in Brussels, where we got together with a dozen or so of our most important customers to listen to them, to collect that feedback and to come up with an action plan to improve on it. The other thing we're doing is, as we start to work with partners, so you know, as an asset like operator, our supply chain and our partners are critically important for us. We recently went through a program of reducing our supply chain from around about 3,000 suppliers to around about 400 preferred partners. That enables us to have choice, but also enables us to build better relationships with those smaller number of suppliers. And we've even kicked off, you know, with our secondary kind of resale partner community who are important for us to get to certain customers that we're not targeting directly. We've kicked off a partner advisory board as well. So really, I would say, customer experience is about listening. And that's something that we've really invested in. And then in terms of operational excellence, we're midway through a digital transformation program. You know, the law to make the quoting, ordering assurance process, and we're already starting to see great benefits as we've started to redefine some of the processes that go into that. For example, you know, we're now processing around about 30% of our orders go directly without touching the sides straight out to our supply chain. That's meant we've been able to reduce service delivery times by 40% and we've been able to improve meantime to repair by 50%. So it's actually starting to show benefit then. So your customers feel this obviously and it's increasing your efficiencies and your ability to deliver on some of your strategic priorities. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, we're about 80% focused on the enterprise market. And so Gartner, one of our, you know, kind of key indicators of performance in that space. And over 80% of our customers who participate in the Gartner peer review program, rate is four or five, stars out of five. So that's pretty good. I think yeah, that's pretty good. Yes, congratulations on all the hard work on that front. For folks that may have missed you this week and may still want to connect to with you, maybe while they're still in town or afterwards, how can they reach out to you? Oh, anybody can find us on the stand, come along and check out the GTT stand. Maybe come and find one of the team. If I'm not around, then there's plenty of people here. If not, reach out to me on LinkedIn or some other way. Thank you so much for joining us today. I've really appreciated chatting with you. Any final words that you want people to know and watch out for GTT next year? I mean, GTT next year will have completed our financial restructuring. You know, we'll be starting to deliver more in terms of customer experience. We've launched a bunch of new products and services, including our Sassy partnership with Palo Alto. So stand by for loads more news. We will be watching and we'll be looking forward to speaking with you. Same place, same time next year and see what's happened. Thanks for joining us and thank you viewers for tuning in to Capacity Europe Extra, powered by JSA here at Capacity Europe. Stay tuned as we do have more live interviews coming to you today from Capacity Europe. Welcome to Capacity Europe 2022's pre-event coverage. We're looking forward to delivering this year's eagerly anticipated blended event on October the 18th to the 20th at the End Continental London DO2 and on the SWATCARD app. I'm David Tran, the conference producer lead of this year's event and in the run-up to the event we'll run a series of rather light-hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes With, tapping into their industry views but also bringing out the person behind the speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in this year's Five Minutes With, I have Sammy Slim, CEO of Telehouse France. Sammy, how are you first of all and the great tab you're involved in our conference program for this year's event? Ready for a quick five-minute Q&A? Absolutely, thanks for having me. So let's start the clock. Okay, so Sammy, tell me the state of play in the global telecoms market. Well, we're seeing more of blurring boundaries between the Tenco DOTT infrastructure, something that is reaching the industry and we're looking forward to an exciting future. Great. So where would you say then your organization is positioned at the moment as the industry is seeing these shifts like post-COVID, digital transformation, current inflationary pressures? Well, what is great about our industry is that all of those prices are merely acceleration to the transformation, to digital transformation. However, there are real risks, especially related to energy price and energy shortage and the industry is even forced to be affected by that kind of problems. And does the industry have a talent issue? How can it solve the problems? Well, definitely yes, as the industry is. And I think the problem should be solved in the future with what we are seeing now in terms of remote work and remote teams, distributed teams around the globe because that actually brings the talent pool to a more global one. And you'll be speaking in a subsea at data center related session about interconnectivity between those two landscapes. It must be an exciting industry to be a part of. Incredibly diverse and things seem to be moving along at quite a relatively fast pace. Absolutely. That's actually our main driver to the capacity scenario. I'm very, very excited to what kind of topic we share because the telecom geography is changing thanks to the subsea. And we are looking forward to see what are the future cities where interconnection can happen and how do we have to reshape it as well? Now, I wanted to tap into a little bit about you yourself as a person. So, Sammy, what's your preferred method to connect with your fellow industry peers given how platforms like Teams and Zoom have transport reliability convenience and connecting with fellow professionals in the past two years, in-person or virtual in terms of day-to-day engagements? A nice drink with a great view. I've got a lot of Teams and Zoom. I like that. But to be honest, it's good for introduction which the human needs, right? So, if you want to solidly appreciate we need to be a person and I'm looking forward to that. Well, yeah, definitely. It's a great segue to capacity Europe to be there in person in adding to Continental DO2 in London. So, what's the first thing what's the one thing that you're hoping to take away from being part of a capacity Europe this year? Well, I think that's the answer to those questions on how do we manage this blurring boundaries between different technical segments? How do we manage the new Europe? How do we manage the new crisis and energy in Continental? Those are things that I am looking forward to discuss with my colleagues in the ministry. But again, we have a chance to be able to see growing and that the world is needing it back. Especially when it occurs it will be a very, very exciting meeting. Definitely. And it's this huge event as well and taking place in the UK capital of London. So, tell me about what you most love about London, the location of the capacity Europe 2022? Definitely the view there in YouTube. It's really great to meet the people but I happen to, we have an office in London so I actually love being in the office. Oh. So, good. So, yeah, one of my definitely my favorites is in New York. And I'm saying that I'm from Paris. You know, the competition. Plenty of competition between Paris and London there. But two marvelous European cities and really modern as well. We've got 45 seconds to go. So, we basically got a few quick questions here for you. Give our viewers one fun fact about you that they don't already know. Most people, so I've been known in the industry as CEO of France, but they house France. Most people don't know that I'm actually not French. I'm Tunisian. And yeah, when people discover that Is there a person away from this industry that inspires you the most? Well, I would love to meet the person someday if I have a chance. So, I ended up on CEO of Microsoft. That's someone that has reshaped the entire community as big as Microsoft. And yeah, that's the time's up. So, yeah, that's our buzzer for that one as well. So, really great speaking to you, Sammy there is a very quick buy into you. You just realise how quickly five minutes goes up in the flash, doesn't it? But thanks so much. That's been great. And then Sammy will be speaking at Capacity Europe this October in London. Details of the session will appear in the following closing messages. Bye for now. Welcome to Capacity Europe 2022's pre-event coverage. We're looking forward to delivering this year's eagerly anticipated blended event on October the 18th to the 20th at the Intercontinental London DO2 and on the SWAT card app. I'm David Tran, conference producer lead of this year's event. And in a run-up to the event, we'll have a series of rather light-hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes With. Tapping into their industry views, but also bringing out the person behind the speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in Five Minutes With, I have Mateus Freeschrom, the vice president and chief evangelist of Aurelian. Mateus, how are you first of all? And great to have you involved in our conference programme for this year's event. Ready for a five-minute quickfire Q&A? I'm absolutely ready. Good stuff, Mateus. So let's start the clock. Mateus, tell me the current state-of-play situation in global telecoms. I would say it's in a pretty good shape. Traffic is still growing post-pandemic, which is a good sign. There are though some signs of costs going up because of some circumstances around the world, but I would say the overall feeling in the industry is pretty good. And where would you say your organisation is best positioned at the moment as the industry is seeing these shifts, like post-COVID taking place, digital transformation, and also the current inflationary pressures that we are seeing? I think we are in a pretty good shape. We're not a big organisation. We're very focused on high-capacity transport services and IP services, and I would say digital transformation, moving traffic to the cloud, using public internet much more. Those are good signs for us. So I would say we're in a very good position right now in a tough market. And how have the past couple years to shape the way you connect with your fellow industry peers from a personal perspective yourself, Mateus? Yeah, you know, I think that's a good question. And I was very skeptical of the webinars in the beginning, but I would say through the pandemic I've kind of enjoyed all the webinars that's been going on, and that's been a fairly good way. But I'm really eager to see people again now so you can get the feeling of the industry from a much better point of view. Well, definitely. We're looking forward to bringing capacity Europe in person in October 2018 to the 20th in London. So how enjoyable is it working in this telecoms industry compared to when you first entered it? I would say it's really enjoyable. I've enjoyed it all the way through. But when I started 25 years ago, I would say not very many people understood what we were doing. Internet was very new. Everything was more of a phone call situation in the telecoms world. Today, everything relies on what we do. Internet is for everyone. So it's much more seen these days and therefore quite a more funny industry with many more being part of it. What's the interconnectivity between data centers and subsea is exciting as well as important to see these sectors talking to one another? Mattes, what do you think we are seeing this overlap between the two markets? Why is it becoming more profound? Yeah, I really think content needs to be as close as possible to end users. And you can't really be closer to end users if you're at the submarine cable station. And therefore, I see this. It's a very good sign when cable or content providers locate their content at the station itself because at the end of that sea cable, there is an end user and that user wants to take advantage of that content as soon as possible. And therefore, we see these two industries merging as we speak. And what's the one thing you're hoping to take away from being a part of Capacity Year 2022 this October? I think you want the overall feeling of the market. You want to hear the bus on the floor. You want to see what people talk about. But then I really think the rumors, that's what I'm there for. Speaking to people on the side, asking them how you're doing, what's going on, what's happening, what's happening with this company and so on. That's what you've been missing for the last couple of years. Yes, definitely. And talking of the event itself and the location of the event, what do you most love about London? No, London is a really nice city, but it's also this international city. You hear the bus from really everywhere, which is what you've kind of missed the last couple of years, seeing this feeling, this international bus with people from everywhere kind of in one place. I really love London. We've got a couple of questions there, but we realized we've still got 17 seconds on the clock here. So if it wasn't for going to an event, talking of London or other international cities around the world, Mates, what would be the first thing you would do if you were in a new city? I absolutely look at maps. I love maps, you know, and when I come to a new city, I want to see the maps, so I know where everything is and I kind of enjoy just looking at maps, following maps, making sure I see as much as I can when I come to a new city. That's really what I look forward to. And perhaps give our viewers one fun fact about you that they didn't already know. No, I'm a really big sports fan. Many people know I'm a big sports fan, but I'm really a big sports fan because I love all sports and I kind of have a secret habit of trying to learn all the rules of every sport there is and not too many people try to do that, but I just enjoy pretty much every sport there is. I don't watch it too much, but I read a lot about it. Okay. Well, we've got eight seconds, so any hobbies, any other hobbies? Four seconds? No, I like being in the forest as well. Oh, brilliant. Good stuff. Well, that's times up there. Thank you ever so much there, Mateus. That was great. Mateus will be speaking at Capacity this October in London. Details of this session will appear in the following closing messages. Bye for now. That's just a flavour of what's coming. What we're going to talk about today is what it's taken to get here, what we're doing and the entire scope. It's not just about mobile. There we go. Right, so I'm Matthew Griffin. I'm head of commercial telecoms at Transport for London and I have with me Andrew Conway and he's CTO or Director of Solutions and Innovations, sorry for that's your old job title, for BAI Communications. We're here today because BAI were awarded a 20-year concession from TfL just in June, 21st of June and we're going to explain what that concession is all about. It's in line with the Mayor's Transport Strategy. The Mayor has asked TfL to make its assets available for telecommunications use and to put mobile coverage on the Tube and that's what we're doing. So TfL, if you don't know TfL, it's a very large organisation. People think of it as London Underground. It's a lot more than that. It has, if you move in London, then we're responsible pretty much. So it includes a major road network. We manage all the traffic lights, for example. And just to give you a scale of TfL, here's some sort of big numbers. There's 31 million journeys every day. We're slightly down on that at the moment, but actually we found the road traffic is back to normal. Bus networks around 75% and the Tube is running during the week 50% to 60% and at weekends even higher than that. So we are edging towards normality in terms of the number of journeys that we're looking after. So what we have here is a network that is very large. For the Tube, the underground part of the Tube, we have 132 stations on the Tube that need covering with mobile coverage and we have hundreds of kilometres of tunnels likewise. Now, I was tasked with getting mobile coverage on the Tube, amongst other things. My responsibility in TfL is to liaise with the telecoms industry. We already provide access to our rooftops for cell sites. We have the Wi-Fi network and we also have fiber running through the tunnels to a certain extent, quite a small extent actually. But what we decided is we needed to supercharge that and we needed investment to do that. Internal to TfL, I was told I had no money. So I was told we're not zero budget. I could run a procurement but that was it. So we needed a partner to come in and invest in our network. So what we did is we created an offer that included all TfL assets. Previously, a lot of times we'd looked at mobile on the Tube and looked at just the Tube assets and just from a mobile perspective. But what we did in this case is we looked at it from a much broader context. And Andy's going to talk about the ambition that BAI have got for that and we have found a partner that matches our ambition to use all of our assets to deliver a step change in connectivity for London. The other thing we wanted, we wanted a neutral host. So we wanted a partner that would open up our network to the industry as a whole. And we believe it creates a whole load of opportunities way beyond those that we can think of at the moment. Now the other thing we've done on a technical basis, we've been de-risking it by installing antennas through the tunnels. And we've also been able to use the TfL assets and we've also been putting in fibre and connectivity within the station. So lots and lots of infrastructure's been going in. Over a hundred million has already been invested. The other thing we're supporting as part of this is the new emergency services network. The new emergency services network in London is replacing Airway, which is tetra-based technology. It will be sitting on a 4G network provided by EE. And to support that in the tube environment, we needed the EE 4G signal everywhere, including back office. So areas where the public go, but also everywhere else. So we've been doing that element of it. And aligning these two projects together has allowed us to save hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by creating a neutral host network that will be shared by the emergency services as well as the mobile operators. So that was our compelling financial case. Also, I'm hoping some of you travelled on the Jubilee line today. If you did, you will have noticed that we have a 4G network just on the eastern end of that. And that was a project that we delivered brilliantly. This went live the day the UK went into lockdown. So we were going to do an enormous announcement. We kind of got overtaken by events. So it's been there for quite some time now. Although for us, because we've barely come into London or travelled on the tube, it's kind of a new experience, but it's been there over a year. That network is very similar to technology that's going to be rolled out everywhere. And therefore we know that this service that can be produced by such technology is excellent and provides a really good customer experience. We do know now, I was quite surprised at how busy the tube was today, because I've travelled on it recently and it's not been so busy. But you're still getting a decent throughput on that network and be able to use your data services in a way that's, I think, perfectly usable. We'll still improve on that and continue to invest in that network. So that service, March 2020, that went live. So we are confident that rolling that out of the entire tube network will provide the levels of service that we require and that the customers of BAI, the mobile network operators will require. So as I say, we've let a 20-year concession to BAI and I'm going to let Andy talk about what they're planning to deliver from that perspective. Thanks, Matt. So yes, good morning. It's nice to be here in person rather than at home on a Zoom call. Yeah, my name is Andy Conway. I head up Solutions and Innovation at BAI Communications, Broadcast Australia International. As you can probably tell from my accent, I'm not Australian. I'm from Yorkshire, but there you go. BAI, who are they? So we've been around about 100 years. So we're headquartered in Sydney where we've been running the Terrestrial Broadcast Network for nearly 100 years. About 20, 25 years ago, we branched out into Specialized Telecommunications, designing and building in areas where there is no signal. So on transport networks, we acquired a company in Hong Kong who specialize in that. Indeed in Hong Kong now, I think they're on their fourth generation, started on 2G. Now they're rolling out 5G on the Hong Kong Metro. And then about 10, 12 years ago, we moved into New York. So our operation there, Transit Wireless, where we deploy cellular service and Wi-Fi service on the underground system. We've done the same now in Toronto. And then we came to London five years ago to set up shop and ready ourselves for the TFL opportunity. We've also recently acquired a company in the US called Mobility. They also specialize in transportation systems and cellular systems at key venues. We like long term deals that the partnership that we have with TFL is 20 years. The reason being that we are majority owned by the Canadian Pension Plan and Investment Board. So we really welcome to capacity Europe extra powered by JSA. The live streaming newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell and joining me today is Rob Hilliard, SVP and general manager for X2Net. Roy, pleasure. Pleasure. Great to be here. That's to be in person. I know it's been a great week. We're sort of winding things down slowly here on the last day. Tell me about some of the highlights. I mean it's been a big event and lots happening. What have been some of the highlights for you? It's been a great event. I was part of the judging panel. So seeing those submissions in the awards last night were fantastic. So shameless plug to put your submittals in for next year because it was fantastic in the quality. No, it's been great. For me it's been a bit of a back to the future moment which we were joking about. I'm coming back to where I started in the industry in terms of building customized lit and dark networks. I've been under the sea and in space and it's going to be back. And what I think to your point about the comments this week and I'm so excited about the future with X2Net and it was echoed throughout this week which is it's not about future proofing or next generation. That's kind of a known that you have to do. But it's really what I've heard echoed is organizations need networks that are adaptable and flexible so they can be in control and react to what's going on in either their customers minds or the marketplace or obviously what we saw last couple years all the environmental issues that come up with COVID and what have you. So that's the part that's interesting. So the future from an exciting point of view is I'm pumped for X2Net because that's exactly what we do. We do that. And I do appreciate the movie reference. It's a consistent theme here with you in our interviews. Yeah, I appreciate that. And do want to give you a thanks for the we had Carl Roberts on earlier and we were we were speaking about the judging process and the amount of work that goes into that. So on behalf of everyone here, thank you. It's a lot of fun. No, it's a lot of fun and the submittals are you know I did it last year than this year. Phenomenal submittals and what I told folks is it's a great opportunity to tell the world what was going on because you don't get a chance to see what's what's happening out there. And we saw snippets of it with the awards last night. But but a fantastic work that's going out not only to affect lives and connect people that we talked about, but also just amazing parts of business, you know, acumen that sometimes you don't see, you know, displayed as well. We kind of we kind of get the boring network, you know, people vibe and there's some really cool stuff going on. We're doing some great stuff, you know, in the wireless, you know, digital infrastructure. So we're all excited where I'm taking notes on what we can maybe do for next year. So we'll see what we'll see. Yeah, well, I mean, that's just the thing. It's an opportunity to to share to connect with customers, connect with partners, connect with the industry, you know, you know, learn as well from one another. And I think that's been one of the themes this week is just the the idea of the the need for continued continued momentum, but some collaboration as well. Absolutely. As I mentioned, you know, echoing in terms of the adaptability of networks. And that's where, you know, I'm here talking to carriers that need to come into the U.S. or obviously other other individuals. And what I'm excited about is what what X and that's able to do from a digital infrastructure company is we build, own and operate the type of flexible models that clients and venues and providers need to be able to be in control of the networks that empower the lives of the end users. And that that user's life could be the corporate, you know, logins and things of that nature to obviously great venue experiences. We've had some great recent announcements. But then also it goes to maybe the applications where are really the lifeblood of what's going on and we're a part of all that. And that's that's the exciting part. And that's what you're hearing more and more here that it's it's shifting to, you know, how do we how do those networks become flexible? And I think it's going beyond an SD when orchestration it's it's to what can we do to work together. And a lot of the conversations I've had this week is how can we change the way we partner? How do we change the way we go to market? How do how can we work together to for a better solution? And so we're kind of going again back to kind of the old bilateral. How do we come together to solve problems, which I'm super excited about. And you you alluded to and I want to hear a little bit more about this. But some of your recent wins with some of some big venues. Tell us about that. Absolutely fantastic news. The most recently with MGM in Las Vegas. And I think it's a great pivotal moment as an example of what the types of organizations and the trust they're putting in us to to run their their operations and and be that support huge fiber and wireless and indoor solutions. And what we're looking to do and specifically in my unit is looking to to really look at that and take that to providers and customers across a variety of segments. Entertainment and networking and gaming and all sorts of things of that nature. Cloud providers, data centers, in particular, know a lot of work with the data center folks as well to really build that scale both in the dark and lit services to be what happened. And that's exactly what you see with the MGM. And there's some other great ones on the way. You took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say it's been a lot happening and some nice shifts for you as well. Talk a little bit about, if you would mind, just looking forward, right? And so as we look into 2023, some of your strategic priorities. Right, right. So, you know, that that the unit that's doing similar things to the MGM, you know, there'll be other announcements like that and some great wins that that'll come through in those types of venues and organizations on our side. Really the telco infrastructure side that we're working on. You know, we're looking to really leverage the densification we have in some key metros. You know, Vegas is a great one. There's Dallas, there's San Francisco, of course, the Northeast corridor. And really look to that and what you're going to see us do is start building more, you know, in terms of fresh builds and new ways to look at problems in terms of connectivity. And also tweaking what we can do with our network to try to add different pathways. So, you know, we're on our side trying to have those same big wins as the MGM and that support. And I think we'll get there because we've got a very, you know, great pedigree of customers that we're talking to. And so a lot of exciting things coming down the line. And we'll be looking forward to watching the news as it unfolds and seeing you. I'm sure we'll, of course, see you at some events throughout the year. But this time next year, we'll be sitting here and maybe you have some exciting things to talk about. Hopefully, like I said, I was taking notes of possible submittals. And I think the other big differences we're looking at is in terms of us coming out and really being more outward with the stuff we're doing. We're a small, you know, situation of what we do as a company, but we play a very big game. And you see that with the MGM situation. And we're looking to do that same thing on the high-end enterprise and other segments. So, yeah, you're going to see exciting things. You're going to see us out and about more. And you're going to see a lot more from us for sure. We're excited to see that. And for those of our viewers and anyone here at Capacity Era, for those that may not have made it here and want to connect with you, how can they do that? Absolutely. So, I mean, obviously, extinetsystems.com, you can get there. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn and what have you. We're all out there to be able to talk to you about anything you're looking at. And share some neat things that we're about to plan for 2023 show. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Roy. Yeah, thanks for being here early on day three. Not too bad. Not too bad. After the award show early, but not too early. On a normal day, not early. Correct. Yeah. So thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to Capacity Europe Extra, powered by JSA. We are close to wrapping up our final day here at Capacity Europe. Just one more interview to go, but do stay tuned and we will be back shortly. It's a big event for the community. It's a great networking framework for all of us. I extremely appreciate the opportunity to have this whole colleagues and partners and stakeholders in the community together. And this year we have identified more than ever how important also in-person meetings are after being locked down for almost two years. We are at the beginning of a new decade if it comes to the industry development and exciting times ahead of us having the digital transformation everywhere for everyone and everybody, this will change our industry as well. We're happy to be here at Capacity Europe to be again here and meet the industry and we are going every year because for us it's really big events. Meeting all of our partners across the carrier industry, other industry as well as technological partners. Meeting here in one venue which helps us very much to bring all the energy together to face all the challenges and to face all the business opportunities that the market is bringing to us. Creative Ledger to be part of Capacity Europe 2021. A true partner of choice and looking forward for the future success. It's to meet customers, partners and essentially connect with the ecosystem. If we're not all successful, no one is. I think we'll increase the way we co-create together. I think the importance of igniting end user, be it consumer or enterprise experiences become more important and I think ultimately because we need to propel more growth. So I'll see you at Capacity 2022. And see you at Capacity Europe 2022. We'll see you at Capacity Europe 2022. See you at Capacity Europe 2022. It's annual Global Carrier Awards. I think there are an awful lot of events on the calendar. It's a bit of a jamboree, but I think the Global Carrier Awards stand out, the Capacity events stand out. I'm looking forward to this because a lot of people know what's going on around them and the rest of the world from partners, from other operators, from our customers. Tonight this is the place to be in telecoms. We'll recognise the best global and regional carriers, projects, marketing and sales teams, campaigns, disruptors and innovations. You know, really genuinely pretty products. A new award category and I think it's brilliant for you and I'm really, really happy for you. I'm really honoured and delighted to be part of this great group of companies and we want to win some more. So congratulations to everyone. I hope you had a wonderful evening. Thank you. Welcome to Capacity Europe 2022 pre-event coverage. We are looking forward to delivering this year's equally anticipated blended event on the 18th to the 24th of October at the Intercontinental London DO2 and also on the SWAT Carder app. I'm David Tran, Comfort Producer Lead of this year's event and in the run-up to the event, we'll have a series of rather light-hearted speaking interviews called Five Minutes with tackling to India industry views but also bring out the person-partner speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in Five Minutes with, I have Eric Seavis, President Global Wholesale of Verizon Partner Solutions. Eric, first of all, great to have you involved and great to have you speaking at this year's event. Ready for a quick five-minute with informal interview? Absolutely. Looking forward to it. I'm glad to participate and support the Capacity Europe event. Verizon, we like to show up each year and support the event so glad to do this for you. Great, great to have you in the room as well. We're looking forward to October. All right, let's start the clock. So, Eric, first of all, tell me the cover and state of play situation in global telecoms. I believe that, you know, enterprises around the world are kind of looking for what we call global simple and secure solutions at the end of the day and we see this as an incredible opportunity for global telecom providers in the industry. If we look at our assets, regardless of what's going on in kind of the economic and geopolitical vein, this is just a great opportunity for us once again to deliver things into the business and to the industry. So, global, simple, secure, that's the way the solutions need to go, whether it's network, whether it's above the network, wireline and wireless services. It's staff. And where would you say your organization is positioned at the moment? I mean, we've seen these chefs obviously with the post-COVID take place but also digital transformation really kind of gathering momentum within the industry but also there's also a turbulent economic and inflationary climate as well. Where do you see your organization's position? If I look at my Verizon partner solutions global wholesale team, we feel we're kind of very excited about the assets that we have. Once again, if we look at what we've done, we spent over $120 billion getting our spectrum with C-Band and millimeter wave and once again we've got vast fiber deployments across the footprint right now. So very strategic time for us, whether it's wireline, wireless, what are we doing from Ethernet to wave to internet services, even what I'm doing above the network with BlueJeans conferencing or security services or what I really love is the passion we have in the wireless area today with wireless backup or the internet of things or our own fixed wireless access services that we're doing on LTE business internet. So once again we think we're very well positioned in the industry, we've made the investments and once again we want to help our customers that have big bandwidth requirements. Certainly and you're very much a familiar face within the industry circles for capacity events. How enjoyable is it working in this industry compared to when you first entered it? Okay, I think you're calling out the fact that I've been doing this for 36 years. Yeah, started back in 1986 and we were doing a lot of dial tone, dial tone, dial tone, but I will tell you the industry has just transformed tremendously. So from everything we're doing from our digital customer experience transformation where ease of business is kind of the forefront of what we do with APIs, candidly what we're doing across the board when you look at new products and services in the industry, you know the days of just dial tone when today you know as I said earlier I'm selling Ethernet services, I'm selling wave services, we're selling internet services, but above that we're adding things and partnerships with what we do in the cloud environment, what we're doing with the internet of things. How do we continue to leverage our wireless assets as we look at you know fixed wireless access and LTE business internet in the industry. Once again I think it's just a tremendous time not just selling one or two products and services, but a lot of products and services that deal with our basic telecom needs. So no longer just your basic telco, but this is clearly a technology evolution and we're stepping up to it, whether it's things we do organically or partnerships that we do in organically to make certain that we can meet the communications need of the industry. Now we've got 90 seconds left so I'll have a quick fire kind of questions here. You'll be dressing the talent gap in this year's events as well. What is the state of play? Are we in good shape? Yeah we feel we're in good shape, our industry just like every industry I think during this period of time. Once again we're trying to show folks that it's attractive to be in the STEM environment with science and technology and engineering and mathematics and so once again even with the GLF the global leaders forum we're working on diversity inclusion and belonging and one of those initiatives is making sure we're bringing new talent forward and making sure that there are more opportunities with gender imbalance, ethnicity and making certain that we have a feeder pool that's ready to take on this telecom industry going forward. So once again I feel good about the investments, the training and the partnership we're doing with colleges and universities to bring even more talent into the fold. Now you lead your own organization Eric as well which I'm sure has its own pressures and strains. I mean did you ever step back and wonder you know and how you optimize your own helpful and well-being? Absolutely step back. I think it's important to sharpen the saw as we say. Take some time off, reflect, build back that strength and energy and come back even sharper than the day you left and so you know whether I'm taking vacations you know two time a year with my wife or I take the family on vacations or we attend events you know whether it's music events etc. Just taking that time to reflect and enjoy and be thankful for all the blessings. Well I think that's time's up there but just one final kind of like quirky question for our viewers that probably have probably yet to see you in person for the very first time at capacity media related events but perhaps give our viewers one fun fact that they don't already know. Oh fun fact let's see I just went to the Elton John farewell tour concert at MetLife Stadium in New York that was pretty cool and I like cars and clothes so I don't know that's three fun facts for you but hopefully that helps. That was a good lifestyle really Elton John as well yeah well what a great artist as well so I'm quite envious that you got to got the chance to go and see him live as well. Thanks ever so much there Eric that was great. Now Eric will be speaking at capacity Europe. It's October in London details of this session will appear in the following closing messages. Bye for now. Welcome to capacity Europe's 2022 pre-event coverage. We're looking forward to delivering this year's eagerly awaited blended event on October the 18th to the 20th at the Intercontinental London the 02 and on the SWAT card app. I'm David Tran conference producer lead of this year's event and in the run up to the event we'll have a series of rather lighthearted speaking interviews called five minutes with tapping into their industry views also bringing out the person behind the speakers that will be taking part in this year's event. Here in five minutes with I had Angela Capone Vice President Global Marketing at Edge Connects. Angela how are you first of all and it's great to have you involved in our conference program for this year's event ready for a quick five five minute Q&A. Yeah thank you for inviting me definitely. Certainly let's start the clock right now. So in our five minute Q&A here we go. Tell me the state of the play in global telecoms. Yeah I mean global telecoms isn't just 5G and Gigabit telecoms anymore it's the wider challenges of country regulations trust from our customers climate, economic growth, the worrying inflation news that we're seeing and where to build next. So the balance is getting increasingly difficult with large cloud services requiring ever bigger capacity while also lowering overall missions across supply chains. So closer collaboration among operators, clients, industry bodies, government agencies will be needed to be at the forefront of any future expansion. And where do you see your organisation position at the moment obviously it's in a post-COVID climate it's fundamentally changed. Yeah I mean when COVID hit Edge Connects was well positioned actually to not miss a beat. We were all remote workers for years and the data centres had the ability to remote operate through our Edge OS software systems. So when it hit we kind of didn't really we felt the impact you know from a world perspective but we didn't actually from an operational side we just continued on it was incredible. So to continue with the drivers like digital transformation without the impact of COVID was a testament to our strategy to set way before it was struck. And we were able to continue a pace for large enterprises as we were able to work with their IT providers to offer solutions in markets large and small. And as the Edge continues to develop globally we will continue to plan and supply land and power serving the largest global companies worldwide when they need it, where they need it. So it's the data industry in your point of view first of all are you enjoying it and second of all in terms of the people landscape is it suffering from a lack of diversity and it's in the workforce and if so why? I mean yeah I mean when I talk to people about the data centre industry you kind of get that that blank look on their face so it's not incredibly exciting but what I've seen over the last 10 years of working at Edge Connect is the talent that is actually coming through difficult but it is coming through and the diversity of the talent is what I really enjoy and I'm loving seeing our employees you know join at a certain level and you know 10 years on their you know running teams and their head of security and all of those different roles so you know we are lacking in diversity for sure but I believe it's not for not trying as a company we work really hard on different projects to attract talent from going out to universities talking to the STEM type community that probably don't think about data centre as an engineering type of place to go and work but when you talk to them about what we're doing and what we're developing and actually what our customers customers are doing I mean I'm very privileged to be in Welcome to Capacity Europe Extra powered by JSA the live streaming network for telecom and data centre professionals I'm here at our tail end of day three of Capacity Europe here with David Tran lead conference producer for Capacity Europe David wow what a week it's been and tell me a little bit about you know as the producer of this event how are you feeling yeah I'm feeling great obviously it's the last day of Capacity Europe a great chance for all the attendees to have a final chance to meet with their clients and prospective partners as well I mean as for the conference program that I had been working in delivering for this year's event as well over 90 speakers across the blended program as well and an immense level of conversation and relevance to the community about how we actually deliver digital infrastructure in the years later really so yeah it's a fantastic event to be part of. Some of the highlights maybe from some of the panels can you can you give us for those folks that weren't able to attend all the great content that's been happening here. Yeah we had a mixture session so for instance about the the viability of delivering age within an ecosystem for the metaverse and how is that going to manifest in terms of creating the digital input outlay using that and the connectivity service providers role within the delivery of this and it's manifested in terms of other topics in terms of fraud and in the GOF the GOF's work as well so there's been a number of like highlights it's hard to pick one because all the sessions have been immensely supported well attended and yeah it's been a great program in that regard. And I've been hearing some of those highlights even I've had you know of course the opportunity to speak to many of our sponsors and attendees and speakers here you know on past Europe Extra and it's been a lot of what you've said has come up and then and then also you know some of the trends that people are seeing across the industry but overall this sentiment that it's so amazing to be here in person the energy of the week has been amazing and you know I think you can tell us I've heard a rumor that record numbers this year in attendance. Oh yes record numbers in attendance some 2800 attendees plus have visited attended class of Europe this year which is absolutely startling we couldn't believe you to actually see these numbers especially just soon coming out of a pandemic as well so obviously you know we still got you know more that we can actually do to evolve the conference experience and the attendee experience something that we've been planning for been long thinking about in terms of delivering and maximizing that audience engagement from a variety of countries and a variety of sectors within the connectivity ecosystem. Yeah and I mean it's certainly you know as you said bigger than ever bigger than pre-pandemic numbers and you can sense that you know the growth of the industry but also just the appetite people have to be back in person and having those you know face-to-face conversations continues to be a need that people have and our people have been so I what I've been hearing really really happy with the results of the week and so thank you to the you know you as one of the producers of this event has been fantastic do you I think that what it shows us you know is that people really still want this format you know if you think about what's ahead for capacity Europe and capacity in general what are you sort of thinking what we've learned about the before the pandemic in terms of that format of that confidence experience and networking experience it's all changed and with the help of the learnings of 2020 and 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic and delivering that virtual experience well we had to actually take the best of that and provide a blended experience and we are looking at aspects such as you know what we've got new for this year which is the capacity Europe extra and it's we're trying to involve into something you know totally different that can actually bring content right up to life and discuss the key themes that people in this industry are talking about today but also the challenges pain points as well as the opportunities involved as well and it's beyond the just the conference stage you know there's a variety of ways that you know people get their information we know that there are so many events around there are so many publications around as well so it's about trying to provide that audience engagement through a variety of means using our video channels our broadcasting channels and so forth as well and capturing that imagination of the attendee as well and think of what they really really want it's something concise something enriched something immersive as well yeah that's that's part of our capacity Europe and capacity media event strategy now and into the long term future it makes so much sense I mean really delivering up the content people want and the ability to connect as people also need but in serving it up in different ways so that people can consume the information as they see fit and as it suits them so that that's I think it's going to be so great to to engage in more of these going forward and so can you give us a little bit some sort of calendar highlights coming forward what should people circle on their calendar for capacity so quite a few events coming up closing out capacity in events in 2022 with Mexico connect with capacity Asia so look up with those dates around the November time on the capacity media website there is also in 2023 where we pick it out straight out the starting blocks with events like capacity Middle East and you've got later on other events such as ITW the big international telecoms week in May and other kind of well I would say more kind of niche events like SPS messaging and SPS world as well which is a phenomenally supported event for that market you've got capacity Europe as well this time next year so we're very much looking forward to providing that attendee maximize attendee experience as well audience engagement networking is fundamentally important to every single event that we do as well and we think long and hard about about providing the platform to have those right conversations take place whether it's in the expo hall whether it is in a virtual facility or whether it is in the conference room or anywhere else really as well you're going to get all of that in 2022 and 2023 with capacity media events thank you so much I mean there's so many so many great events to look forward to and and for all of you definitely check out the capacity website to see information on upcoming events and thank you yeah thank you for this has been just such a successful I think week and successful event thank you for the work that you do and the group at capacity and capacity media and thank you viewers for tuning in and being here with us this week as we've had great conversations with industry thought leaders experts people leading our industry really and talking to us about key trends and priorities and the amazing collaborations that are taking place in the industry and the partnerships that are forming there's a lot happening and we'll be back here again you know this time next year back at capacity Europe but until then everyone stay safe and enjoy be busy and we will see you back again next year all the best