 to the telecom exchange CEO roundtables today is our last CEO roundtable of the day we're excited that you're here joining us both as our guests in the room of telecom exchange NYC as well as for our viewers on periscope as well as on JSA TV we'd also like to thank our Wi-Fi sponsor Kelly dry our last panel the day what tech companies need from telecom partners we are honored to have Mr. Eric Hanselman the chief analyst of 451 research as our moderator Eric has an extensive hands-on understanding of a broad range of IT subject areas having direct experience of course in the areas of networks virtualization security and semiconductors he coordinates industry analysis across the broad portfolio of 451 research disciplines so please join me welcoming Mr. Eric Hanselman thank you Jamie and I would like to start out introducing our guest panelists today from my left David Meredith from CenturyLink Frank Ray from Microsoft Philippa Alvarez from Axiom and Mark Hurley from Schneider gentlemen if you could take a moment to introduce yourselves and your companies great thanks Eric my name is David Meredith I run the data center business for CenturyLink CenturyLink is a third largest network provider after AT&T and Verizon we're also one of the largest data center providers so we have what we call hybrid IT solutions network co-location managed services public and private cloud we also do consulting so we're putting together hybrid solutions for our technology customers my name is Frank Ray I work for a small software company in the Pacific Northwest and I work in the cloud and infrastructure division building out our data center and fiber infrastructure globally Philippa Alvarez CEO of Axiom fiber networks we're a telecom infrastructure provider focused on dark fiber and custom solutions so we operate and I say operate because we do have a fully operational 18 mile fiber network including five car hotels in Manhattan at the moment but we're focused on again dark fiber and custom solutions and I'm Mark Hurley with Schneider Electric Schneider Electric is a manufacturer of infrastructure that goes into a data center environments and I focus with our customers on data center strategy and solutions to meet their business needs well thank you gentlemen what the topic we want to address today is what service providers relationships look like with emerging technology companies and what both technology companies are looking for what service providers can provide for them and really what that interplay is of a lot of these next-stage companies who in many cases have dreams of changing the model of the world especially from a tech and a telecommunications perspective and what those realities are in terms of relationships so with with all of you so why don't we kick it off with a question of in terms of those emerging technologies and your experiences with them what do you see that these early stage tech companies are typically looking from each of you and Dave when you start with you great thank you so we are seeing the rate of change accelerating faster than at any point in the past so what we talk about a lot now are X as a service providers so historically if you look at what the model say in the software space was you would build software and then you would sell a big license to an enterprise customer they would install it on premise and then they would operate that software license more and more today the cloudification of all these services is permeating through so customers are looking to buy payroll as a service sales force as a service everything as a service and pay for it by the drink so with that happening we're really our relationship is changing now instead of selling our infrastructure to the enterprise all the time frequently we're actually doing a sell-through sell with type of partnership with the technology company where they're selling their service that's run on our infrastructure because they need to be best in the world at building their specific service out and they want to they don't want to do the investment and become experts on running the infrastructure and that's where it's a very good fit so we've actually verticalized this X as a service segment where we're going out and doing special solutions that are packaged for them to help them win more business with their customers Frank you're seeing similar things at Microsoft is that a partnership aspect or are there other pieces to that it's yeah you know we work with the fine folks at CenturyLink as well as a lot of other providers now we're obviously building on a global cloud infrastructure we have a lot of challenges that that come along with that from a scale and scope issue so you know we look to our telecom partners to do what they do best you know I don't really have a need to build out a team of 2,500 field engineers to go swap out a card in the middle of Fargo North Dakota or something like that so I need to deal with billions of customers reaching our services every single day so we're we what we're looking for right now is to have folks understand the challenges that we're facing as a global cloud provider and work with us within their field of expertise to solve those issues to address what we are trying to accomplish not necessarily just what's going to drive revenue in their bottom line per se we I think we have a difference between other cloud providers and that we have a lot of products that folks like CenturyLink and others can have a sell to and sell with relationship right we're not there looking to you know launch balloons or drones and things like that and become a telco provider and take away that revenue rather we want to figure out how do we make those services stickier for the telco providers and offer more value for their customers so to do that we need to make sure that the telco providers are looking at what we're trying to solve and understanding that and trying to pivot their business to help us solve those issues in a way that reaches reaches the same scale and scope that we're trying to achieve that makes sense so Philippi on your side from a fiber perspective and unfortunately I'm at the bottom of the stack so it makes things a little less complex to a large degree so what we're seeing is essentially nothing honestly nothing new the requirements it's about being flexible the speed of delivery being able to customize a solution whether it's in terms of the business terms or how something is designed and delivered so that's what I call it the basic tenets of being a good service provider so we're seeing that request come in I think one of the changes is that especially in some areas I mean you see quite a bit of a pricing pressure because some of these companies a small software company from the Northwest I mean and similar so I mean they're used to dealing business doing business on a large scale we happen to be a niche provider but I think that's part of the discussion process is look I mean given where we are we can do all of this the price points is typically the and the delivery timeframes are what come into play but again nothing new honestly at the fiber level is you had to get it get it into where we needed to get it by the time you say you're going to get it into at the price point and then maintain it and that's again I go back to the core principles of what service wires do especially at the zero layer so to speak I think Felipe and I share the bottom of the totem pole you know we're in the business of providing data center solutions to our customers and what I see in the marketplace is you know there's always cost pressures everybody is in competition with one another and everybody's driving for the lowest price but they also want speed to market the the development of technology is growing at a faster pace than our infrastructure can support it and we need to figure out ways to deliver these data center solutions quicker they're also looking for predictability and reliability you know predictability in the cost when you're deploying data center solutions either in a regional data center or an edge compute facility you want to be confident that what you're getting in you know one state or one country is going to be the same over and over again and I don't think we're there with predictability everybody has their own ideas about what they need in the way of data center infrastructure the other thing I think it's that's changing is is I see a move from high reliability data centers to high reliability software applications and that is driving down the requirement and the and the reliance on data center infrastructure to have a hundred percent uptime because of their ability to fail over and that's helping drive down that infrastructure costs well we can have the whole discussion around those tier 2 plus tier 2 equal tier 4 that whole another topic and another panel session on that but but you bring up some good points about some of those changing demands of what do you have both Mark and Fleet Bay you guys were talking about a lot of those pressures around that triad of quality cost speed that's being pushed to you what do you see as something that that you'd like to see from tech companies in terms of either input into this process or more background or something to help you do your business better well yeah sure what I would like to see is some sort of standardization on the platform because everything is engine or engineered to order custom everybody has their own idea of what data center design they need what resiliency concurrently maintainable you see people use the terms tier 3 data center tier 2 data center well if you look at a tier 3 data center not all tier 3s are created alike every one of them I look at is different has a little bit different spin on it so some some consistency you know if we could if we could develop a commoditized data center product that could be delivered that everybody can agree on then you're gonna really drive down the prices and increase the speed to market speaking with my uptime institute hat on there are a lot of different ways to skin the tier cat a lot of ways to build it so standardization certainly would be a useful thing but I know so Philippe similar kinds of things in terms of access service I think I focus on that something's like to different which is I'd like to have a relationship where the potential buyer the partner actually it's open about what they're driving at sometimes because we're a small part of a total solution you get a component of it you know my wish would be that they'd be more open as to what the total solution is how do we play a role in that and set realistic expectations on delivery and price points I mean I'm fine walking away from a deal because there's a discipline to say no I can't do it but at that price or I cannot do it at that timeframe and I and I rather walk away from this deal today and come back into something else tomorrow basically but is that inter the cooperation between true partners that I think it's it's not always present and I go back to I mean we're a component very often of a larger solution and sometimes it does help for us to understand what a larger solution is so open as to the degree that you can I'm being able to see the whole elephant as opposed to grasping at individual pieces of you might help us make decisions in a different way sometimes or think about some other ways of getting at it you know rather than doing a complete vacuum of I need this by this date at this price or walk away right so Frank similar kinds of things do you'd like to reflect back I know Felipe would like to have a lot more transparency for me at times so you know I think Mark brought up a good point you know certainly all data centers not created equal not all applications are created equal not all clouds are created equal as well you know Microsoft we have 200 online properties and we service consumers to enterprise to government customers and all of them have their own requirements from security privacy data sensitivity etc so government regulations some of the things that we also talked about this morning on a IOT panel so trying to mesh 200 different online services into a single cloud with you know the multitude of different requirements is certainly you know certainly somewhat challenging I'd you know if we can figure out what that standardization looks like I'd more than welcome to have that discussion be a lot easier for me to deal with my engineers but the I think it is true what what what Felipe said I think there needs to be a little bit more transparency of what's happening in the cloud business but I think that carriers and telco providers need to understand what's happening you know take a moment to understand what's happening in the cloud space right now you know there's a lot of market share that's being addressed and going after specifically within Microsoft you know we when I started about three years ago and we were still an enterprise consumer of telco services and I say enterprise consumer very specifically because the way we were purchasing services was all very outsourced the network data centers were not a key part of our supply chain you know we were still a box software provider so you know we did some math and presented the the business case to Steve Ballmer the CEO at the time and if we had continued to build out our cloud infrastructure the way that Microsoft was doing it when I joined it would have cost 20 billion dollars a year which basically would have been meant bankruptcy for Microsoft we certainly would not have been able to compete with Amazon or anybody else so taking the path from enterprise consumer to investor you know it's a little bit difficult to just try to tell everybody what you're doing and expect them to be on the up and up you know so there's that aspect of it so trying to understand what the cloud providers are up against amongst themselves I think that would I would like to see the telco players take as much time to understand that part of the business as much as they try to figure out exactly what they're doing so they could build something to come and sell it to me and I think that would be forge a closer partnership between the players David from your side what would you like to see we see the relationships fundamentally changing right now so we're really looking at building communities or ecosystems where we sit in the middle of many to many relationships so on the network side even though we're the third largest network we're proactively going out and we're creating network diversity so on average some of our data centers have more than 20 network providers on average we have seven network providers into all of our data centers on the cloud and services side we're trying to bring in lots of different providers as well so we have over 20,000 enterprise customers we want to build communities and ecosystems where someone can be just a cross-connected way from whatever solution is that they want to get and when you're talking about being in a community there are responsibilities and obligations you have to that community so it is a fundamental change in how we all relate to each other and we think it provides a lot of benefits for everybody in that ecosystem well as we start building out greater dependencies about our ecosystem partners that winds up being much more critical in terms of all those interconnections when we think about what those interconnections look like there's still an awful lot of effect about what's local versus global reach we start thinking about issues around data sovereignty issues about locality I mean in theory we live in a world in which location should be unimportant right but that's still a reality that local connectivity is still a big deal placement is important and especially start dealing with data issues Frank is that something from a Microsoft perspective and you've got an infrastructure that spans the globe how do you start to balance those concerns around what's local and global reach and really starting to balance some of what is that that larger set of questions about how you interact with a set of providers yeah I guess anybody that said it that localization is not an issue has never tried to get a cross-connected Rockefeller Center so that's a very interesting question I think we talked about this a little bit this morning as well part of what everybody is trying to solve I think is is is part of what creates most of the intricacies and difficulties and challenges within the telecommunications industry in that you know the way you do something in Paris is completely different the way you do it in Marseille and you haven't even left France yet so just use an example all of the way that things happen locally similar to the standardization with the data center all of these little intricacies make up what the global internet is and it's exactly that which kind of makes it work and what drives the engine forward and trying to drive innovation and finding new ways to do things so on the one hand yes I want to standardize part of my job is to find where all the toll booths are in the internet and try to get rid of as many as I can for Microsoft and but yet on the other side I don't want to see that kind of localization go away because otherwise we lose a little bit of the entrepreneurial spirit that will find those inefficiencies within the market and within the technology to be able to drive us forward so it's kind of a double edge sword and sometimes I think you have to be careful what you wish for drones and balloons will fill in all the caps right and all the sensors but I think there's an opportunity there and that's companies there are companies out there that are popping up that are called the buffer companies these are companies that act as an insulator in a way that you can deal with and that absorbs some of the locality variances right they can provide services you know and make it transparent to a buyer like a Microsoft let's say you know as to what all of the everything else that's happening behind that right because they're dealing with all the issues and all that and smoothing out the variances there's a few out there that are coming up that I think are interest so there's a market opportunity for that kind of service dude similar thoughts about the balance between local and global yeah our cuss our customers really drive where we go with with our solution so we have several of the Fortune 500 as customers today we're in Singapore Tokyo Hong Kong we just recently launched in mainland China Solutions we're in Europe and we've also had our customers come and say look we need global coverage we like the fact that we can do one master services agreement with you and you manage and just take all the complexity out we call it the big staples easy button we just make it really easy for them so we've actually connected our 57 data centers to 230 other data centers around the world so we can essentially provide a seamless set of services globally that was all driven by customer demand very specific needs customers had when you look at some of the big underlying trends that are driving Internet of Things big data these are creating a need to have a global footprint for some of the bigger customers and is that something that you see any variation between the Fortune 500 and early-stage tech companies or similar kinds of requirements yeah the born in the cloud companies are really interesting and so we like to work with them as well and we're seeing a real boom in business in the Bay area right now we have about a half a dozen data centers there so they don't know where they're gonna have success so when they set up shop they have some ideas they have a business plan usually it shows up into the right or for investors but but they don't really know where they're gonna get traction so one of the things we've introduced as a concept we call flex spend which essentially says sign up with us and if you need to move your workloads around our footprint globally we're gonna take the friction out of that for you so you're not locked into a geography and if you start to get traction in a particular industry vertical or geography we can support that in a way for you and they seem to respond well to that so mark and the data center side do you see demand that varies between what those local requirements are and that aspect of global reach is that something you're primarily dealing on the facilities side or Snyder is a global company but as Frank alluded to there's different requirements with whatever country you go to they have different codes around elect electrical codes they have different permitting requirements and it creates a challenge now fortunately we're a company that has offices throughout the globe that are focused and can and solve those particular business problems in that location but if there's no standardization across the globe that's like if I can paraphrase a politician from up my way all data centers are local something along those lines you know I think it's interesting what David said and the folks like Century Link and others they're doing a really good job and in trying to create some form of ubiquity for their end users but I think what that really masks is the complexity and the localization and the differentiation that happens at the actual service level across the board so while you may sign one contract with Century Link you don't see the multitude of contracts that they need to sign to be able to service you in China or Malaysia or South America or wherever so you know that's I think part of the opportunity that Felipe was alluding to. Interestingly enough I mean the more I listen to this it seems like going back to the one big telco in the sky is probably the best option right? That's what the drones are for right? I want to make sure also we're gonna have that we have time for audience questions before we run out our time understanding between all of you and Bellini's and so keep your things caps on if you have questions for any of our panelists by all means want to make sure we have time to take them. If you think about what telecom operators are doing to address some of the misalignments in timelines for infrastructure development you know we're in a day and age where it's now now now and we whip out the credit card and generate cloud capabilities. We're certainly not there and we can certainly raise the question whether we should be there in terms of the operator side of things. What do you think about being able to deal with some of these issues? Felipe you'd mentioned you know one of the challenges of ensuring that you're delivering on time within requirements but we're seeing a lot of that I know from anecdotally from our client base there's a lot of gotta have it now how do we actually work around what our procurement times that that made sense historically and have a lot of practical issues that that prevent them from moving much more quickly. You know my comment about these buffer companies and companies that kind of help absorb that kind of shock essentially it's very valid because the reality is I deal with a very small microcosm right now this is just south of 15 I street and the amount of it's not dissimilar to the global environment because you're dealing with landlords in New York City the city of New York the conduit system 10,000 things that people don't realize are required just deliver fiber two blocks to a carry hotel right so it's just a very small microcosm of the larger global issue unfortunately I'm not I'm not very positive on the outlook that we as an industry can actually inter smooth out all of that on our own I think companies will drive us there that what I call the emerging and I hate to say telecom companies but the emerging companies that are essentially becoming the new telecom service providers and you know I have one sitting next to me here even though I'm sure they'll they'll deny that but I look at them this is the future what you're talking about this is the future essentially they're taking things with their own hands because we as an industry can't so to for us to do it on our own it's going to be difficult because we have we're competitors you know we're buying for the business I mean we're pricing you know we have investor issues we have to we have the same a lot of issues so I go back to there's a market opportunity for companies again absorb that hit and pass it and not pass it on to the customer I'm happy to do it whatever order if you're chomping at the bit there no it's fine yeah the it's true I mean Mark Mark said it before a lot of the cloud providers content providers new tech companies as they're being called now you know we have all of this localization we have all this differentiation and we're looking for more predictability within our supply chain over the last 10 years the timelines to build out large-scale infrastructure projects is getting longer and longer if they even happen at all while product development cycles and time to market in today's digital economy continues to get faster and faster you know we as cloud provider within Microsoft we live in a world where if a customer doesn't like us they can move all of their services away in a matter of two clicks and I probably will never get them back and on the flip side in a positive note they may comment to me and say hey I'm looking I have eight data centers today I'm not a data center provider I'm a you know natural gas provider I want to move all of my workloads as a test into one of you know take one of my data centers and move those workloads into your cloud and two months later they say that happened so great I'm gonna close all of my other data centers down and move all of my workloads over to you and I'm gonna do it in three months can you do that right and all of a sudden now we have to be able to move as quickly as possible within a matter of clicks because otherwise if we can't do it they will be gone so trying to do that while dealing with regulatory environments permitting environments whether or not somebody is able to get funding from a VC or a bank or anything like that you know these are things that that are extremely disruptive to to my supply chain and that's something that you can call it taking matters into your own hands you can call it whatever I try to call it bringing more predictability to the scale and scope of how our services run for our customers and their mission critical data yeah I think Frank referenced earlier how we work really hard to make it easy for our customers and I always think of the synchronized swimming if everything above the water is so graceful and flowing and beautiful and effortless and you don't see all the legs churning underneath the water when you're watching that particular sport so it is a big issue and at the end of the day customers as I want we've all my data centers in three months and that's a ton of work you have to do but you've got to be able to meet their need if you can so we've done several things to try to help one thing around innovation is we've actually launched modular data centers so we're working with a great partner named base layer out of Phoenix and we have deployed multiple megawatts of modular data centers so it used to be we're going to build anywhere from one to ten megawatts in a phase now we can drop in at 200 kilowatts and we can drop in module so it's more capital efficient we can get it to market faster and it has other benefits as well for our customers we also do preconfigured bundles so we have a connected colo bundle network plus co-location we do is something called fast track where we guarantee to have a customer up and running within seven days and the only way you can do that is you've got to basically put some bets down in advance and know really where the demand is going to come from and have the solutions ready to go but we've been pretty good about saying ahead of that and it really comes down to having a close relationship with your end customer so you know where their demand is going to be and you can try to stay at least a day ahead of that mark you're actually on the delivery end of that equation yeah just to kind of tag on to what David said you know you can build modularly and scalable in a traditional fashion or you can do it with a prefabricated solution but I think not all data centers are created equal and the needs aren't equal across the industry but for your particular purpose if you can identify what your your base need is and standardize on that design you can get a prefabricated solution or a stick-built modular scalable solution already preplanned you know how it's going to lay out 200kw increments 500kw whatever whatever your particular business eat is and then you can deliver it more cost effective and with a greater speed to market you know my previous career I work for a large financial institution built a lot of data centers with them every one of them was custom unique re-engineered from the ground up and it just wastes a lot of time and money you know in my where I live in North Carolina you see a school being built well they use the same engineer design to build the next school that's coming up the next middle school or the next high school and that's where you can gain efficiencies it's good but I want to make sure we've got time for questions from the audience so anyone with questions for our panel today we're asking about security security's been a big issue a lot of the trade shows recently a lot of the press obviously likes to talk about security there have been discussions that maybe security will be something that's not no longer handled by customers they'll be handled by service providers or even by people like Microsoft or Amazon providing that as a service on top of a carrier what's your opinion on where security is going to be as it becomes more important we definitely have more and more customers coming to us asking for help with security for one thing it gives them a little bit of protection to say hey we hired somebody else to do this in case something you know there is an incident so they like to have that we what we've done is we've set up managed services within our data center footprint where essentially in our customers are just a cross connect away from a managed firewall solution DDoS protection all sorts of virtual security in addition to the physical envelope the security that we provide around the data center we're not a product company when it comes to security so we're really looking to provide a service so we're working with different product companies out there to Fortinet is one that we think very highly of where we can take Fortinet solutions and run that as a managed service for our customers and we see a ton of demand for that we expect to see that growing quite a bit going forward other questions all right well that I want to head into a closing question for all of us the environments in which we're operating are rapidly changing that's been just the one of the basic facts of technology what do each of you see as opportunities in the time ahead in terms of being able to to work in the tech space and engaging with companies and the kind of capabilities that you can provide so mark when he starts you from the end opportunities well in infrastructure you know people are looking for low cost they're looking for energy efficient total cost of operation one of the areas I see is with regards to UPS systems that are backing up your hardware I think there's an over specification on battery runtime for backup purposes if people would be willing to adopt shorter battery runtime you could save a significant cost in your UPS I mean your generators gonna fire up in in 30 seconds or less and transfer the load so why expect 15 minutes worth of battery backup or in some telcos you know the old you know DC power plants it's eight hours of backup but you know why spend that money to back up something that should transfer in 30 seconds and the reality is is can you really get a generator plant online if it fails to come online in that 15 minutes that's a hit or miss question you're just you just scared me well it's all about building more tier 2 data systems right the software solves all those problems right software resiliency application resiliency is what we need who needs better than anything Philippines similar kinds of things in terms of fiber versioning well look fiber is a very simple business right I mean there's not a lot of nuances to what we do when you do with fiber I mean I think opportunity wise there's always an opportunity to continue to build the fiber network out eventually there'll be enough connectivity certainly never mind the US across the world that you be able to actually move your data centers quicker you know shift the data and it's not even move the data centers you shift the data processing loads and what Frank was alluding to which is someone can shift you know a complete data center processing processing terms anyway overnight right so we'll get to that point we're not there yet in some areas we are you know we can figure out exactly how do we compete against each other without you know killing the customer essentially excuse me but I go back to opportunity wise and I may go and start my company go Philco the buffer company I mean which kind of takes in all of this variances and nuances and central ink and axiom and zeo and everybody else and we kind of say listen guys I mean we're gonna do this and then Frank can go to that company and say I'll buy from you because I know you take care of all of this stuff and I don't have to worry about right there'll be a risk and so on and so forth so I think that's sort of like what comes out of this whole discussion because again as an industry we're not going to make it easier for the buyer honestly we've been trying for how many for 30 years as long as I've been in the industry and it's not getting any easier is that a matter for higher level standards something on that order I don't think it's a standard issues as long as you have different companies interacting with one another and different investor sets and different egos involved you're not going to see it and that's the job of differentiation that Frank was mentioning so you're trying to extract value and or a differentiate in each of those environments that's standards grind that down yeah the standards is you know I think the real at the end of the day the standards are the laws of physics you know that's what it's gonna that's what you know everything else is as Felipe said you have nationalities and egos and regulatory bodies and politicians involved so it's going to be very difficult to find certain standards but I think where we're going to see a lot of change and impact aside from the pesky laws of physics you know a lot of the virtualization and the networking space as well in addition to what we're seeing for example in the industrial Internet of Things where I think that's really going to stress certain business models in the telecommunication space from a billing perspective provisioning perspective and operations perspective and that coupled together with data analytics and data visualization is going to allow us to drive a lot of efficiencies from an operational side and a business side across all kinds of different industries so I think we're going to see in that space a new type of industrial revolution that's really going to allow us to to change the way that we work not and it's not you know not just my refrigerator telling me if I'm out of milk you know it's about the plane sending a note to the airport that it needs a maintenance while it's still two hours in root driven by a lot of data I was having a conversation earlier today about data and agriculture of all things anybody know how much did cows well does anybody know how much data a cow actually generates turns out it's not very much but there are a lot of them but dealing with that and the opportunities that creates similar kinds of ideas it's a really exciting time that this move to the cloud it's really the gold rush of our generation and we're still early days on this so if you look at maybe 15% of all enterprise servers are in third-party data centers I think probably I think 451 says what about 26% of all workloads are either cloud or third-party data center so there's still a lot of workloads to move over and where we're positioned is really we're sell we don't know who's going to win there's going to be big winners big losers in the cloud space but we're going to be there selling flint tinder rope mules whatever whatever infrastructure gear they need and we need to be best in the world at that and we need to innovate on that so to the point that mark was talking about we're really looking to innovate and drive cost lower for our customers so we're the first ever multi-tenant data center provider to power a data center with bloom fuel cells we've recently launched a data center in the Pacific Northwest almost a hundred percent hydroelectric powered so the cost per kilowatt hour is 2.8 cents if you look around the North America your tip of being to see on average north of nine cents per kilowatt hour so we're able to pass those types of savings and those renewable green benefits on to our end customers so we're trying to innovate in the space that we can to make it better better for them going forward sounds good well with that we will wrap it up I want to thank all of you for joining us today and will you join me in thanking our panelists thank you very much