 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, where we're talking about the latest stories, trends and innovations live here from Capacity Europe 2023. We're in beautiful London. It is actually a very beautiful day today. It's a nice day, yeah. Yeah, not bad. So I came here with the beautiful sunset behind. There was no rain, so you really can't complain. So we are starting off the day here with one of the leaders in connectivity and digital infrastructure. We've got Edison Smith, Global VP of Sales for ConnectBase with us today. Welcome, Edison. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Yeah, good morning. So we will go ahead and jump right in. Right. You all at ConnectBase launched some really exciting news yesterday morning. So if you want to just give us a quick intro into that news and people can find out more on the website, but just to get them excited about it. Yeah, absolutely. So we've actually been offering this product on our platform for quite some time in the US, but it hasn't been available outside that market. So our US customers have been benefiting from it for a while. This is the first global market that we've launched it in. So what it is, is it's our plan and prospect tool. So ConnectBase provides a lot of location based insights for the connectivity industry. And what we're doing with this tool is we've actually loaded tenancy data. So this is commercial companies across the UK and Ireland. And we've loaded that into our industry leading location platform. And now what it allows customers to do is to use this as a planning tool for building fiber routes. So you can look at what's my ROI going to be based on estimated telco spend in an area. You can also use it for customer targeting. So I could put in a UK business like Waitrose or whatever it is. And it will show me every location that they have around the UK. And it will also tell me where my network as a service provider intersects with those buildings. So I can see, are they a good fit for my footprint? Do I cover most of their locations and get them good price or not? So from a targeting tool for your team's prospecting, it's a game changer. I mean, no one else is doing this in the market. And our intention is to continue to roll this out across other countries around the world. But UK and Ireland was the first. Excellent. Yeah, that's super innovative. I mean, you can always look to ConnectBase to stay on top of the market when it comes to helping buyers and sellers in the connectivity industry. We like to stay ahead of stuff and do some cool things. Awesome. So you have been heading up MIA sales at ConnectBase for about six months now. It's been quite a busy time since then. I'm wondering what's now that you really know the market. You've been in the industry for quite a while before that even. And you've been like so with ConnectBase for six months. So what do you feel like is the number one challenge that ConnectBase is solving specifically in a MIA for customers? Yeah. So yeah, I joined in May. I spent 15 years in APAC in the talk of industry and then five years in MIA in Europe. And I joined ConnectBase in May, actually a week before ITW. And I went to ITW and did 35 company pitches. You know, it's like a company that makes computers or a computer that makes companies, I don't know, a week into the job. So the challenges in MIA, it's interesting that these are actually global challenges. The cool thing for us is that the problems we solve exist everywhere, which is actually a bad thing for the industry. And the challenge is that there's a lot of local knowledge here in the industry. If you look at just the UK, I was at another conference a couple of weeks ago that was around the connectivity industry in the UK. And I'm walking around and there's companies there that have spent millions of dollars building fiber assets that I've never heard of. And so global buyers just don't understand local markets. And that's a real problem if you're a service provider and you're trying to be found, that's our hashtag. And so what we're doing for MIA customers, the same thing that we're doing for global customers is we're giving them the ability to promote their capabilities to show the world where they can provide services and at what price, and really tap into that global wholesale buying community and expand their reach. And it's very difficult to do if you're not on a digital platform. Yeah, that's really interesting. I feel like it falls in line with a lot of the themes we've been hearing during other JSA TV interviews and just around at the conference, like the importance of ecosystem as an industry and the power of partnership and how we all kind of have to work together in some way in order to meet the incredible demand that we're all faced with. Absolutely. And I think the challenge is the industry knows this, right? We know we need to digitize. We know we need to transact better and collaborate better. And people are trying to do that. They're building APIs in their own portals and et cetera. But again, to your point, if everyone's doing things in a silo, then your customers, buyers still have to log into 16 portals or build to 18 different APIs. And it's just still fragmented. It's just digitally fragmented. When you bring on an ecosystem, a combined marketplace or an ecosystem like ConnectBase, you bring together everyone. It's the same reason that financial exchanges aren't fragmented. You want to trade on the NASDAQ. You got to connect to the NASDAQ, right? I mean, it's a centralized exchange. And that's what we're building for the connectivity industry, right? If you keep everyone separate, then you lose that benefit. But if you bring people together, it can collaborate, it can transact, and it makes life easier for everyone, right? Yeah, I love that analogy. Yeah, everybody can understand that for sure. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Yeah. And so you had mentioned when you started back in May right before ITW, which sounds like quite... That was hectic a week into the job, yeah. Yeah, quite a show to get thrown into. And also around that time, we were announcing the last mile exchange acquisition, so ConnectBase acquired London Base. This is very relevant for the show, LMX. So could you talk a little bit about that and really how it's helped ConnectBase customers? Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, so LMX, I mean last mile exchange, or LMX as we call them, they had built the most powerful digital procurement platform in Europe, right? Anything outside of the U.S. And ConnectBase had the most powerful platform in the U.S., right? And ConnectBase customers were historically mostly U.S.-based and LMX was Europe and a little bit of APAC as well. So bringing these two platforms together, again, it comes back to this ecosystem, right? You know, there was a lot of conversations obviously about it and we kind of realized that the platforms are better together, right? We bring together these two marketplaces so the benefit for ConnectBase's existing customers being U.S. is that they now have access to all these European providers that weren't previously on the connected world, which is our platform. And for last mile exchange, we're bringing in a whole bunch of new functionality like the plan and prospect tool we just launched for the UK, which they don't do. So we're bringing in all this new functionality for their customers, right? And bringing in additional tools that they can use. And again, it just comes back to that whole concept of we need to bring everyone in the industry globally together onto one ecosystem and then allow them to make the decisions on who they buy from, who they sell to, how they transact, right? But if we keep people fragmented and separate, you know, it just doesn't work. So the LMX acquisition was great. The teams all on board with us now, everyone's working really well together. And, you know, we're super excited to be partnering with them and working with them as one company. Excellent. Well, obviously ConnectBase is very fast, fast growing companies. So definitely your space to watch and connectbase.com. Absolutely. Check it out. Yeah, yeah. And be found, hashtag be found. That's right. Keep an eye on that for LinkedIn and Twitter. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This was an incredible first interview for the day to kick us off. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here and good luck with the rest of the conference. Thank you so much. Same to you and to all of our viewers. Thank you so much for hanging out with us here at JSA TV. Happy networking.