 JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine and welcome to JSA TV. We are coming at you on location from ITW 2017 and I am here with my friend, Mr. Mike Jonas. And I call you friend only because we've done this a couple of times before. Once or twice? Yes, Mike and I, and because you have a longer title I'm gonna go ahead and read it. Mike is the President of Global Customer Operations for Light River. Mike, thanks for being with us today. We appreciate it. My pleasure, good to see you again. You're outstanding, good to see you as well. So why don't you let's start with the really good stuff. Why don't you tell our, you've been very busy already in 2017. Oh my. Lots going on there. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that? Well, 17 was planned to be a year of growth and the reality is matching up. So we're... Congratulations. Lucky enough to say we're having growth in all sectors. All of our customers are growing and there's no lack of work and there's no lack of challenge but really the way technology has been evolving the last couple of years has set up perfectly for 17, 18, 19 for a lot of people to improve their networks. Both from a capacity point of view and a manageability point of view but as we all saw in the news over the weekend from the security point of view as well. Of course. Of course, well let's go off-strip. Why don't we talk a little bit about the security point of view as well with obviously with the ransomware attacks and things like that. What is it that you folks can provide about kind of peace of mind might you give to your customers? Well, so as you know, we've been spending a good deal of time and effort on software-defined networking, on virtual network functions and one of the areas we had honed in on over the last year has been this notion of virtual security appliances and we'll be announcing some partnerships there and some successes there. By happenstance, some of the announcements we're gonna make coincide with the recent WannaCry attacks but this is an area... And you can't tell me anything about this stuff yet, can you? No, it'll have to be the next time we talk. Okay, good. But it's a real issue and to Light River, the virtual application that aligns most strongly with our brand which is quality, which is resiliency, which is predictability is that of security. So if we're gonna spend a lot of time working on virtual applications, virtual features that our clients can benefit from, we decided to start on security. Good call, good call. Let's talk about partnerships a little bit and I'm gonna read this. You are recently collaborating with the Telcom Infra project with the likes of Facebook and some others. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that partnership? Well, you bet, I mean the growth in capacity needs on the planet is something that's been difficult to even measure, let alone predict. And so we have been pushing the envelope on what is possible with traditional orthodoxy and how do you build a network? How do you design a network? How do you run a network? And Facebook and others have decided to embark on an effort to look at something outside the traditional orthodoxy. What is it we can do differently? How can we do something differently? Can we disaggregate these networks? Can we make parts of the network easier? Can we bring more people into optical networking such that we can broaden the base of what's possible? And Light River has 20 years as a vendor neutral integrator. We have a little bit of background in trying to get different products to work together and trying to make them simpler to run and in trying to ease the transition for our clients from legacy technology to the next generation. So we're thrilled to be part of it and we are looking at as many ways as we can to make it easier to put wireless and optical networking in higher capacity in the hands of more people in a broader footprint. Very cool, Mike. So you mentioned your customers a little bit in the response to that last question. You guys have a variety of different customers but among growing lists of customers are the utilities. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about your utility partnerships and what it is that you provide for that group? Well, our customer base has one thing in common and that is that they need high resiliency, highly secure, highly predictable networks. We started the company 20 years ago building those networks for utilities. So it's always been a history of adapting the technology to fit the needs of our customers, not trying to fit their needs into the existing technology. And so utilities have been an area where we have historically designed, developed, and deployed the best in technology for their particular needs. I mean, that's a sector where subject matter expertise and credibility are paramount. And so because of our long commitment and long history of success in that sector, we've been fortunate enough to participate in multiple technology shifts over the years. And another one of those is going on right now. So more capacity, they are adopting DWDM in a big way. They are adopting Ethernet in a big way. They are looking at some of the virtual network functions. And believe it or not, there are a lot more forward thinking on some of the software defined network applications than you might think. Outstanding, okay, so you're actually providing segues for me better than I could possibly for myself. We were talking about the future just a second ago. Let's get the crystal ball out and I want you to tell our viewers a little bit about what they might expect to see from you folks, say, over the next year or two. Yeah, you bet. So we have been investing heavily in software relationships and software development and in identifying those, amongst the hundreds of possible applications, those that are going to benefit our customers most and you're going to begin seeing evidence of success in partnerships, evidence of success in deployments and some real world readily available opportunity for transport orchestration that'll be deliverable later this year. And these are all ways to help our customers get the most out of the networks they have. We have high capacity. We have more fiber than ever. We have more bandwidth available than ever. But you've got to optimize that. You just can't keep throwing money at it and we believe that and we're helping our customers to understand that and we'll be sharing with you some of the successes they had as the year goes on. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it. Well, let's do this again, okay? Mike, thank you very much for being with us today. We appreciate it. Good to see you again. You got it, you got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We will see you soon.