 Welcome to JSA TV where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Buffy Harakides of JSA and joining me today. We have the expanded leadership team here from Toniquant. We have Mike DeVito, he is the CCO. Mike, welcome. We have Terry Morrison, CTO and COO. Terry, welcome. And we have Gavar Bhavaja, he is the CFO of Toniquant. Yes, gentlemen, welcome so much here to JSA TV. And Toniquant is the premier data center solutions provider for mid-market organizations in high growth emerging markets. Yeah, and you're growing your leadership team. We're all here together at PTC. We're so excited to have you. Let's dive right in and discuss Toniquant's position in the digital infrastructure industry, specifically in what ways has your organization been preparing to provide clients with the highest level of solutions and services? I know there's an acquisition that comes into play there and some expansion. So why don't we start with you, Mike? Sure. Thank you, Buffy. As you noted, Toniquant is a hybrid IT data center provider. We are very much focused on mid-market enterprises in emerging markets at the moment, principally west of the Mississippi, so in the Mountain West and in the Southwest. We have a platform that extends from St. George, Utah to Boise, Idaho, and most recently our newest acquisition, the Edgex facility in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. So we're here celebrating that. It brings us some capabilities we didn't have before. It brings us a market that we didn't have before, a market that's growing. But more importantly, I think we're here celebrating the new leadership team that we have here. In the last several months, we've added to that significantly. So to your point about how we're preparing for the market, we're preparing for that market and its growth and to serve our clients, not only by extending our platform, but by investing in our leadership team. Terry joins us from Edgex that our COO, CTO, whoever's been here for a while now. I came over a year ago, so we're really pleased to be able to expand the team and our platform as we continue to grow and serve these clients, most of whom, by the way, we know that really need us from an IT perspective. They just don't have the resources to tackle these larger IT tickets. Yeah, for sure. And we talked a little bit about that new data center facility in Oklahoma City. It does expand, obviously, your existing platform. Why don't we dive in a little bit more about that facility? It's a purpose-built tier three data center. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that as a CTO? Yeah, sure. Thank you. We finished the transaction that was early November. So we're glad that I have that facility in our portfolio. We're in the process right now of recommissioning that data center. So we're putting in new infrastructure, new UPS systems. We have existing liquid cooling in place. So the data center is going to be well positioned for any AI loads, high density. We expect to have that online in early April. All right. And right now it is a minimum deployment of 2.5 megawatts. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. Today in 2024, we'll have the 2.5 megawatts available. It is scalable. We can go to 8 megawatts gross or 12 megawatts critical. So we have additional capacity that we can put in place in the subsequent years. So it has plenty of capacity and growth for our customers. Okay. And as a CFO, a big role that you have there for sure, right? The investment. So not only the investment from a financial perspective, but the investment in people, including obviously this leadership, wonderful leadership team that you've put together here. Why don't you talk a little bit more about that investment and the benefits that it has put into place for your company? Yeah. No, thank you, Buffy. So I think, as Mike mentioned, we are backed by Diff, which is a 17 plus billion Euro fund. And this is a key part of their strategy to kind of really invest and grow tonic-wind as a mid-market, tier to tier three, market-focused data center business. And us being here, our recent acquisition of Oklahoma City, and then we're looking at other assets as well. That is an indicator of kind of the commitment that Diff has to our platform and to growth. So it's a kind of ongoing journey, but we are here. And we are here to kind of serve our customers in these markets, in the tier to tier three markets. Yeah. And when we talk about your customers and success for the long-term, obviously this acquisition is part of that long-term success for not only your company, but obviously for your clients, those mid-market organizations in these high growth areas. And it does align closely with all of these different solutions that you have this customizable portfolio of cloud, colo, infrastructure as a service, DRAS. Why don't you talk a little bit more about that for us, Mike? So our intention is to build a platform, by the way. I just want to be really clear about that. Like we're not going to stop at what we have now. As Gaurav mentioned, we have significant financial backing. By the way, as an aside, we're very focused on asset ownership. We feel like that gives our clients comfort, quite likely, that we own the assets moving forward. But our idea is to continue to scale that platform. We find that our clients are really moving in that hybrid direction. I know it's an overused term, but they are in fact consuming co-location virtual cloud services and interconnection. We operate meeting rooms. We have interconnect facilities, all those things. And there's other situations that might be interesting for them. Managed security, other platforms that we'll be growing. So it's important for us to keep growing that in a scalable way. But most importantly, while we do that, to retain that high touch, sort of very intimate relationship we have with our clients, they value that. They come to us as a trusted advisory, if you will. So as we scale the business, I think more than technologically, keeping that client focused, that client centricity, will be the most important thing for us. And we'll have to work hard to earn their trust. Yeah, I mean, especially when it comes to managed security. And so, I mean, you mentioned that hybrid IT was an overused term. But the reality is that that's the way enterprises are going in today's market, especially, like you mentioned, with managed security services and the cybersecurity, the more sophisticated these fraudsters are getting in the market today, right? So Toniquin offers all of this. We do, we do. And just one other quick point. I think the other thing that we're well known for is knowing what we do well and staying with that. Like I think, you know, one thing Terry and Gorovin and I and the team have been talking about is, how do we continue to grow? How do we continue to stay in our speed spot that adds value to our clients without straying too far into other areas that may not have value to them? So, Terry, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your client base and maybe some of the acquired clients that came with the acquisition. What industries are they from? Want to give us a little bit more details. Health care, finance, I'm seeing. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. So Oklahoma City was really an asset transition. So that facility was was in play and waiting to receive customers. So Mike can talk to the actual market. We did a full market study. We know what's there and available. Obviously, it's energy. It's an oil and gas city, but it's been diversified over the years. So there's lots of industry there. Number 20 on the MSA, I think is running that area 1.4 million. So there's plenty of opportunities for our customers. But again, today, we're actually recommissioning the site. So we have not brought any customers in. That'll start with Mike and Q1, Q2. But Mike, you want to talk about a little bit who we're looking at in that area? Yeah, thanks, Terry. So just on that point, like I would say that let's say prior to the EDGEX acquisition, our base continues to be very focused on regional businesses in a few key verticals. One, regional banking. So credit unions, banks, insurance companies, regional health care concerns. And these are $15, $16 billion businesses, large in their own right, right? But very regionally focused, okay? Tech is another one. And last but certainly not least is transport, notably in the trucking stroke transportation model. So we love those four verticals. We know them. We do well there. We feel that Oklahoma City and frankly, the Southwest at large aligns with that, particularly in Oklahoma City. We love the GDP and population growth metrics. And as Terry mentioned a moment ago, strong energy vertical representation there, but I think also a morph away from energy, dependence if you like, to other key verticals, finance, health care, biotech, et cetera. So we love the, let's say the KPIs, the wider metrics of that market. And we love the Southwest at large. And the adjacency, by the way, we get other markets in the Southwest from Oklahoma City. And it's a good reflection of what we're going to be looking at as we grow through our M&A process. And they're tier two, tier three markets that are underserved. Maybe there's an incumbent or one or two other operators there. So as we look across the US, I mean, Oklahoma City is a good example of where we want to go. How we want to represent from our data centers. And the 10 to 20 megawatt range is really where we play. So that's your sweet spot. Yeah, sweet spot. Purely in the retail colo side, along with the many services that we already mentioned. So we'll continue to grow those services as well. The small to medium, medium enterprise is really what we'll go down market or up market, of course, as opportunity shows itself. But again, naturally, we want to stay away from the NFL cities that are crowded, if you will. And we also have plans to do some growth builds. So in order to ensure that we can support the emerging AI workloads, the higher density, replicate a lot of capability that we have in Oklahoma City and those newer cities. So we have land that is available to us. We're constantly looking for other opportunities as well for land banking, making sure power is available connectivity of course. But again, we have a lot of growth plans. I think that's key that we're not here just to continue to operate what we have, but to grow at a fairly high rate. Velocity that we need to grow is probably a very important point. And just to add to that, so the other part of it is right now we're in St. George. We're in Boise. We just added Oklahoma City. What we are truly looking to do is basically build a nationwide platform, right? So if you think about all the dots on the map and all the places where our customers may need us, I think those tier to tier three markets but distributed all over the country, that's the most important aspect for us. And that's part of the management team and that's part of the platform build that we're trying to execute on. To Terry's point, we have a pretty aggressive growth plan, acquisition, greenfield development, brownfield development, but I think we just need to continue to execute on that. And really a big part of this is also continuing to understand where our customers need us to be and where we are right now and just seeing how we can fill in the gaps and including expanding the set of products that we have, we're looking at other things and really broadening out the solutions that we can bring to bear for our customers. Yeah, especially when you talk about the customers in the technology, the healthcare, the finance, and the transportation vertical, they're obviously expanding to more digital services and technologies which brings me to the next question about the artificial intelligence and machine learning and some of these emerging trends which are actually driving these industries closer to these markets and the edge where you guys are expanding. So Toniquin is growing, so congratulations, fellows. And let's talk a little bit more about market predictions. When we look at the market, five years from now, the increase of AI and ML, I can't even begin to say how many times we already heard here we're only in our fifth interview today. But let's talk about the trends and what Toniquin anticipates on the horizon, Mike. Well, thank you. I'm going to defer to Teri on some of the more technological trends but one thing that serves our business well, not only Toniquin but our industry, is just the continued growth of demand. There's no slowdown in it, right? I've seen figures of 150 zettabytes of new data creation. There's depending on which analyst you believe a dozen out of the numbers are huge, it's going up another rate, that speaks well for us. And related, by the way, I think that the development of the hyperscale platforms also speaks well for our model because those hyperscalers are going to end up putting smaller workloads in these tier two markets and these high growth markets. And that's where we're going to be hoping to serve them. So I think overall, that's a demand creation, whatever the technology might be, AIML, EDGE, whatever it might be, right? It's just going and going and going and I feel fortunate to work in an industry where it just, it's going up another right to demand. So, me too. I think the densification, right? We're finally seeing that. The enterprise workloads really stayed pretty static as far as the size and what we're starting to see that go up now as well. And then of course, as Mike mentioned, all the hyperscalers are the public clouds, SaaS providers, they need the AI capability at the edge. So we are going to have to support higher densities, which is actually good for us, based on core space. We just need to add the additional power and cooling and then the products themselves, we mentioned that earlier. We're squarely in public private cloud. We have DRyze Baz, we'll continue to grow those platforms, but security as we mentioned earlier is going to be a big foray as well. So we need to develop those products. So we have the full solution connectivity we haven't mentioned. So we're going to continue to support our connectivity needs through our private network, also through peering, through exchanges, on-off ramps. We started this earlier this year where we're going to put that in or other sites, including Oklahoma City. So a lot of moving parts. We've got a lot to do and then continue that growth. So I think the demand is not a problem. It's just trying to meet that demand and be where our customers, as Rob mentioned earlier, being in the right places, right? Identifying those maps those dots on the map where we need to go next. So we're looking forward to that. Great. And much discussed, by the way, that the AIM alt topic is big, but from my own perspective, one of the great things about getting the edgex facility is in the tonic portfolio, it's the first liquid-cooled capability that we have in the portfolio and that'll be key to the densities that Terry's talking about for these more developed workloads. So that'll be great for us. We have not had that previously, so we do now. So that's definitely important of course, especially as sustainability continues to be such a priority in our industry and the world. Just want to add? No, I just, exactly to your point, I think doing all of this while finding the right balance of ESG and renewable and non-renewable sources, I think that's going to be critical. And then the only thing to add to the water cooling technology point is we are, so we have that in OKC. We're going to look to kind of expand that in the way that makes sense in our existing portfolio, other assets, and then also beyond that, as we acquire more assets. So now we have the know-how, we have Terry with us, so we can continue to build out that expertise and provide that as a solution to our customers. Well, gentlemen, it's been such an honor to have you guys here today. Thank you, thank you, great to be here. Congratulations to the Taniqua team and everything that you guys are doing to continue your strategic growth in 2024. And it seems like far beyond. Oh, yes. So congrats again, guys. And to our viewers at home, thank you for tuning in. And stay connected. Happy networking.