 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, here today in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 2020. Joining me is Joe Milio, VP, channel and service providers for VExchange. Welcome. Thank you Barb and appreciate you taking the time to give me this opportunity to talk to, you know, the folks out there that want to learn about VExchange. Yeah and thanks for joining us and on that note, for our viewers who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about VExchange and your role at the company? Great, thank you. VExchange is, I'm going to say, relatively new company. Probably been around for about seven years now and it's really kind of the, I'm going to call the upcoming of a little company that the leadership team had worked back in the early 2000, a company called Switching Data that actually ran 34 data centers in the United States and that company effectively was sold to one of the largest now data center providers in industry equinex. Right, so the leadership team got the band, I guess, say back together again and said okay, there were some great things we did at VExchange, built a tremendous product portfolio. There were some things that, you know, we'd like to improve on from what we learned while operating though. So the leadership team got together and said okay, VExchange started off with an acquisition of one company in 2013 out on the west coast and in the past five, six years it's grown to over 14 data centers in 13 markets. So our foundation of the company is built upon probably three points, performance, reliability and innovation and that'll tie into a lot of what my responsibility is at VExchange. I'm responsible for managing our indirect channel partners so our sales agents, our resellers as well as all the service providers that effectively enable the data center in terms of the ecosystem of enterprises looking for network to enhance their applications and make them access to customer supplies and vendors. So I manage both of those because a lot of our service providers actually turn out to be tremendous partners as well because they're looking to get customers into our data center because those customers can connect to their network so now they look at saying how do we partner with VExchange to enable us and our sales teams to bring customers into the ecosystem. So on that note, on the partnerships front, you recently announced a partnership partner agreement with Tier 4. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, Tier 4 advisors is, I'll call them a neutral or independent IT advisor company, right? So their job goal is to establish the right products and services to serve the needs of their customers and the beauty of what's going on with Tier 4 is that over the past couple of years they've expanded their market footprint and their coverage and their customer base so when they looked at two things that VExchange had to offer was data centers and markets that they were moving into as they grew their business. Effectively, what we like to call growth markets. Those markets that may have been underserved by data center providers, markets like Nashville, Tennessee, Austin, Texas, Minneapolis, St. Louis, right? So when you look at a lot of the big data center providers, they weren't in that market. So now Tier 4 has a product, again, built on performance, reliability and innovation to now enable their sales teams to go out and deliver a quality product in those markets as they continue to expand. And as part of that release, I think one of the key differentiators was the insight to capabilities that it provided. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It goes back to kind of the innovation part of performance, reliability and innovation. Insight is really kind of like a data center management tool. It allows customers to have visibility into the operating infrastructure of a data center. So when you start thinking about how data centers operated with power and cooling, most of the other providers weren't able to provide that insight, basically pun intended on that. And it's like, so now tell me how much power am I using? So it allows customers to do better capacity planning. It allows customers to have access to compliance reports, which are critical in the data center industry to be able to have certain compliance certifications as whether it be HIPAA for the healthcare industry or PCI for the financial transaction community. So now those reports and those capabilities are easily delivered via insight. And then the last thing is really about audit and control. So now access to the data center is all registered and tagged. So if a company comes in or a customer wants to have access, they can set it up in insight and they can get access and then track every step along the way inside the data center. So it allows for a different kind of compliance. It's really like corporate governance. And how do I manage that corporate governance? And being so close to this space, I'm wondering if you could shed some light on your sort of thoughts, predictions maybe for where you see the industry going in relation to data centers? Yeah, I mean the industry is always in change. And you'll hear a lot of the talk about cloud first, public cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud. I think the data center at the end of the day is the foundation for all clouds. So when you think about what a cloud is, fundamentally the data center is what enables the cloud. So when we start thinking about what's going on in the hybrid cloud space where public cloud services are always going to be required for certain applications, certain workloads. However, more and more enterprise customers are realizing that the public cloud infrastructure isn't always the best from a reliability and potentially from a cost. So there's a lot of repatriation going on where early on when customers thought the public cloud was this saving grace are now realizing that's not and they're building a combined solution of leveraging data centers with bare metal infrastructure and well as augmenting it with public cloud access. So I think when we look at what's going on, hyperscalers, right, hyperconverged infrastructure and that's kind of what we look at from a partnership perspective in our channels is we look for, I'm going to call them solution builders, right? Because the end of the day the exchange does the foundation. We're like the lowest level I'll say of the OSI model and we look for partners that build up the stack. It's experts in managed routering, switching, database, storage, compute, right? So the channel says okay let me go find those builders and let's work with them so that now they can deliver an entire solution including the foundation and build up. So we have reseller relationships that allow us to do that. And so with all that in mind, what does that mean for VXchange? What do you see for 2020? I think for 2020 is going to be a tremendous year simply because of what's going on in the industry and the partnerships we're building that now allow customers to have that capability of a highly reliable data center infrastructure that has performance that's 100% availability. So therefore now more and more customers that are looking to make that shift to private public kind of solution has a company like Switch and Data in those markets on the edge. Well I had to throw out edge because everything nowadays is about talking about the edge. But the edge is really about low latency capabilities to support the eyeballs and eardrums of those applications. So markets like Nashville now are becoming critical especially from a growth if you have been to Nashville lately or Austin as a demographic the growth is wonderful so therefore there's more eyeballs and those eyeballs need lower latency. So that's where we're looking at the edge now being able to give us that capability to touch those customers. So from those things we're going to focus on filling up all our data centers, managing to supporting our channel partners that are bringing those opportunities to us and hopefully winning in the market. Fantastic and we look forward to seeing all that happen and how it all unfolds over the next year and years to come and thank you. I want to thank you for joining us again today. Thank you Barbara it was great I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Of course of course you're always welcome and thank you to you viewers for joining us today on JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.