 Welcome, everyone. This is JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA Radio, the voice for tech and telecom on iHeart Radio. I'm Jamie Scott-Octaya of JSA, and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual CEO roundtable. These virtual roundtables lead us up to our on-site CEO roundtables at our C-level networking event, the Telecom Exchange. Next one up, June 20th in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the W Hotel, and just announced Telecom Exchange LA, that's November 7th, Beverly Hills. More info on both events at thetelecomexchange.com. Today's roundtable is brought to you by our video platform provider, Pinnacle. So our panelists are able to stream in live video feeds from all across the world today, which is exciting. So thank you, Pinnacle, and thank you to our viewers joining us live and on demand. All right, well, let's get started. Today's topic, and traditionally, what we find the past few years, are most viewed roundtable of the year. No pressure, panelists. Predictions for transformative technology in 2018 and its impact on networks. We have a C-level lineup, really excited about three absolutely innovative companies, the adult leaders joining us today, and here to help us break it down. I'm very proud to introduce my friend, editor and creator of the industry's very top blog, Telecom Ramblings, Mr. Rob Powell. Rob, thanks so much for returning each year to be our guest moderator and kick off our roundtable series with us on this predictions roundtable. I should also add, if I may, that personally, I look forward to your own predictions and reports on the industry in your Telecom Ramblings blog as well. So, thank you for joining us as our star guest moderator, and please do us the honors of introducing our panelists. I am honored to introduce our all-star panelists. I will kick off with Cliff Kane, he's the CEO of Clearion. Clearion is addressing the evolving access market by providing carrier neutral dark fiber, lit services, hotelling, and service assurance to meet the demands of 5G, IOT, and densification. Next up is Mark Abalapia, he's the COO of DataVision. It's an SDN networking and technology consulting company. And rounding out the panel is Michael Quinn, the founding partner of QAdvisors. QAdvisors is a world-class boutique global investment banking bank serving public and private companies, PE firms, entrepreneurs, and large multinationals in the telecom and media and tech space. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us and bringing your unique perspectives to the topic of new technology predictions and their impact on networks. Set the stage for us, tell us a little bit about your business model and what happened that really set the tone last year. And what do you see as the critical threads to remember for 2018? Cliff? Sure, and thank you for having me. It's always good to get a forum to discuss these types of progress in the marketplace. So for 2017, what we've been doing is cobbling together the foundational components to be able to address this upcoming groundswell of market opportunity to densification, IOT, and 5G. We are keenly tracking the access market, because that's one of our primary lines of business, which is as a carrier to carrier we provide access services in the New York metro area. And we've been putting together some co-location facilities as well. We've acquired some data center operations in this area, and all of this to be able to provide a comprehensive suite of solutions for access. And in terms of going into this year, throughout 2018, I think we're going to see that shift in the access market, because we believe that's becoming bi-directional and that access is going to go two ways. Traditionally, in the access markets, the telecoms call it that because they were accessing their customers or reaching to access the local loop or the end user. At this point, it's going to go bi-directional. It will be inclusive of the end users, which will kind of shift from in our market at least, because we're strictly B to B, will shift from the actual business to the actual end user in that business with 5G once that rolls around. We're not there yet, but that's what we're preparing for. Great. Mark? Thanks, Rob. Great to be here, by the way. So with respect to data visions business and the overall industry, we spent most of 2017 executing on the previous year's work with respect to understanding what our telco clients need from a orchestration and automation perspective for making their operations more efficient and incorporating the new SDN technology into their networks. So from a skills perspective, we've spent time in hiring and training and being involved in things like Metro Ethernet Forum, Open Network Access Platform, ONAP, which is an outgrowth of a couple of other different open source projects. But for the most part, what we did throughout 2017 is see our customers realize a lot of these network control systems. So we've worked on a lot of integration. We've seen a lot of adoption of network functions virtualization and all the integration work that comes with that, working through all the problems to operationalize all this, you know, with bank technology that's come out the last couple of years. And moving forward in 2018, we see, number one, a lot more of that. But number two, with respect to some of the 5G technologies coming out, there's the edge computing paradigm and a number of other related technologies that we think will emerge in 2018. So those are the things that we think are going to build on last year's activity with respect to software defined networking and, you know, particularly our business and pulling all those things together. Thanks. Mike? Michael? From a bit of a different perspective being an investment bank, but we, in 2017, we saw our clients doing a number of different things. First is the ubiquitous rollout of SD-WAN, whether they're a traditional telco fiber company. The idea to get a reach that is broader on a better and more efficient CAPEX perspective. The second thing we saw with our clients pretty much outside the U.S., particularly in Mexico, where we did a billion-dollar raise for the Morgan Stanley infrastructure group to start the new wireless network, is that in emerging markets like Mexico and other places, they're leapfrogging 4G to start rolling out immediate 5G networks. And I think we're going to see that as well. And finally, what we're seeing is in the IoT space, and I think Mark just mentioned, the desire and need for edge computing to keep that data more localized. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that this year from our clients as well. Great. In 2017, we certainly started to see carriers make big moves to prepare for 5G. Where are we in that ramp? Are those preparations themselves changing the landscape already, or is that something we can look forward to this year? What we're seeing is RFPs for densification from the wireless carriers. We're seeing CRAN specifically mentioned and brought into the design of those networks that they're looking to acquire. So I think we're ways from delivering 5G, but it's certainly ramping up. There's real deals happening in our market for this, where there's been thousands, literally thousands of small cell fiber sites awarded to some of the local competitors of mine. So it's ramping up. The carriers, the wireless carriers that we speak to, which is all of them, they're all engaged in that conversation. There's no question about it. And the other aspect of it is that we're looking to provide in-building wireless services with wire line connectivity as well. And that discussion's got a lot of traction lately. So 2018 is still more of a building up year before we start seeing these real rollouts, but everybody's prepping for it for sure. Mark? Yeah, so building on what Cliff was mentioning, absolutely. There's a lot of preparation. They're definitely building on it for next year and moving forward. There's a lot of activity with respect to trials. I'm sure folks have read about what Verizon did at the Super Bowl with trying to do a very small localized area with 70, 80, 90,000 people, all pumping data into the network as well as some of the virtual reality trials and other little hands-on toys that they were trying to do there. So there's a lot of trial work. There's a lot of experimentation. A couple of weeks ago down in Miami at Metro Connect, one of the wireless carriers there was talking about how everything they build with respect to LTE radios now has a piece of 5G in it as well. So they literally have to do minor modifications, flipping a switch, et cetera to move the network from where they are to true 5G. So there's lots of preparation for it. Folks are definitely looking ahead. And again, just to go back to the edge compute paradigm, as folks realize that all this computing power is necessary at the edge, you're going to see a lot of different companies emerge, companies like Cplane AI, and there's another one that's working with Tickets Crown that does this mini data center type of situation. I think it's called Volutus, Project Volutus, or something along those lines. But you're going to see a lot more of these types of hardware and software combinations emerge in order to address that need. So from where DataVision sits in that whole world versus where Cliff sits, once he runs his fiber and builds infrastructure, our intelligence sits at the edge or even at the center of that network to coordinate all that application activity and therefore drive the adoption of 5G and all the applications around it. Michael? Yeah, I agree with the other panelists. I mean, I think 18 is a planning year. And you look at 16 and 17, you had the tower companies aggressively buying fiber companies. The reason is for small cell deployment for the 5G rollout that's going to happen. And in 17, you saw an acceleration of both fiber companies as well as wireless and traditional landline companies buying fixed wireless companies to use the fixed wireless spectrum for backhaul for eventual 5G rollout. So I see our fiber clients getting prime for more small cell deployment as well as distributed antenna and DAS deployments, as Cliff mentioned, in building. And I think 18 is a planning year. By the end of 19, you're really going to see significant rollout. Switching gears. Where is the Internet of Things in its evolution right now? And how do you think we should be thinking of it in 2018? Is that one phenomenon or is it many separate ones or any many separate types of things? Cliff? So for us, we're really just trying to provide the plumbing and housing for IoT applications. Not knowing really, I think it's so nascent that it's really hard to project what's going to be needed specifically in our metro. A lot of stuff gets talked about from driverless cars to street lights and controls. I think all these things are great, but we're really not focused on the application level, but more the infrastructure level is just to enable those things to work and play together. Right, so with respect to IoT, as Cliff alluded to, it's very early days in most of the applications that people have talked about with respect to the cars and the smart cities and all the rest of it. However, there is one area that I think it's much further along and the things being large scale industrial machinery, things like aircraft engines, sending telemetry and the like. But from a terrestrial network perspective and the business that we're mostly involved in, again it's building out the infrastructure, making sure that the compute power is there, making sure that the ability to manage the network that's collecting and addressing these hundreds of thousands and then millions of devices, all those devices have IP addresses. All of them have configurations. All those configurations need to be managed, changed, protected, et cetera from a security standpoint. So from an IoT point of view, there's lots to be done, but we're very early days. And again, this is a multi-year decade plus type of activity that is going to just be pervasive as we move forward. So in its evolution, absolutely early days, beginning of the curve. Michael? Thanks, Rob. So we started tracking IoT about the last two years. Every quarter, QAdvisors produces a heat map of what's hot and what's not. And you can look at that on our website at qlc.com. And it's been interesting to see the evolution just in the last two years. You have some asset tracking going on in the folks who are deploying next-gen wireless systems to airplanes, in addition to having the consumers driving the bandwidth. As Mark mentioned, the diagnostics on airplane usage, fuel efficiency, that is all IoT. So there is a lot of movement. Effectively, it's still a mobile network, right? And once 5G comes around, IoT will accelerate. But there's the negative part of it too. I'll give you a funny example. We were watching TV last week at home, and a commercial for Alexa comes on. And the guy says, Alexa, and the Alexa in my house started talking. So my wife, my wife was like, we have got to get rid of this thing. And there are people both in the commercial and the residential consumer sector that are fearful of this stuff. And so there's got to be a better security mechanism. And we'll talk about that with our predictions for 2018. If I could just add one more thing to what Michael was talking about on that. So with respect to IoT, all these millions of devices are generating a ton of data as well. And one of the fields or ancillary fields with respect to IoT that some people aren't thinking about is all the analytics. So decisions are made. Automation is incorporated. And one of the topics I was going to try to work into here was some AI machine language type activity. And if you're looking at really the pure data that an IoT deployment creates in any environment, it's literally petabytes and adabytes of data. And all that needs to be sifted through in some form. And as we sit here, there are a couple of firms that do this on a day-to-day basis as part of their livelihood. But the bottom line is that all of these analytics and ways to sift through them are going to need some form of AI to make heads or tails out of the immense amount of data these things are throwing off. So that's just something that I think throughout this year and moving forward is going to be a major trend in the business as well. Great. Thank you. In shifting gears again, in the world of network security, where do you think we see the threats coming from 2018? And who has the upper hand this year? Is it the hacker side or is it the network security guys? It's really network security. We're outside of our purview, what we try to do. But from my own personal view, it's coming from everywhere. And with IoT, these devices could be hackable as well. It's really going to be more and more difficult to protect from. And in fact, I heard something a while back by one of the industry pundits basically a couple of three years ago. And I think this whole is true today. What he was saying was that you can no longer try to build a network to stop folks from getting in and hacking and penetrating the network or the computer. What you really have to do is figure out mitigation and how to, assuming that there's going to be folks are going to be able to penetrate. And you have to figure out how you handle it when it happens because it's going to happen. So I think this is going to become like the new normal and be more with us than be able to be prevented going forward. Yeah, I totally agree with those comments. With respect to where we see some of these issues in security, when you deploy an SD-WAN network, obviously people are looking for security there since it's an overlay network. You're looking for VPNs and things of that nature which are encryption. But obviously networks can be hacked. What you try to do is minimize the damage once someone's in. Or as some of our technology partners are moving towards the concept of the Zero Trust Network. And what that attempts to do is basically as the name sounds, no matter what you see there is Zero Trust and there are different ways of securing that network, whether it's session-based or other methodologies. That's at least one form of protection one can use inside of a network. With respect to where the threat is coming from, all points. Threat vectors come from many different areas, whether it's state actors who are looking to steal the latest plans on the F-22 to taking down our utilities networks, things of that nature. All those things need to be hardened. Fortunately people are aware of the problem. Unfortunately there's a lot of inertia in putting the capital expenditures necessary to protect that critical infrastructure. Hopefully our smart leaders in Washington will try to figure that one out and make the utilities do something. But no one wants to see lights out literally. So there are a lot of different threat vectors. They will be continuous, they will be ongoing and it's something that of course isn't going to stop. To the extent that we can protect ourselves with respect to different methodologies, can't change human nature. Anyone who clicks on the ransomware attachment on the email, it's very hard to protect against that. So again it's more of knowing what the threat vectors are, trying to protect to the extent that you can, trying to put whatever that penetration is in a box, whether it's containerized applications or what have you. There are a lot of different ways to do it, but it ain't going away as they say. Michael? I think when you had the amount of hacking that we had with financial institutions and services that were supposed to protect people's identities last year, that's been a big wake up call. I think what you're seeing is two things developing. One is a more aggressive threat management protocol at a lot of our carrier clients. In some sense, using what banks do, oftentimes you can now opt in and get it when you're on your financial institutions website. You can get a text message putting in an access code. Some of our clients are looking at how to deploy that similar thing when folks access into the network from their end user clients. I think we're seeing a lot more encryption. We've got a client infrastructure as a service client, Coleego, and they're based in the Isle of Jersey, and their big advantage of a lot of their customers, a lot of their competitors, is that they have encryption into the network while it's in the cloud and then back out to the client. So this need for encryption is really, really important. And so I think you're going to see a lot of more active network management, and that's going to result in opportunities for startups who are going to be able to deploy technology that carries whether they're wireless or fiber providers are going to need. So that's predictions time, and each of you give us a concrete prediction of something that you think we should expect to see this year in the world of networks and technology. And why should we be watching that? Under the gun, huh? Okay, so this year is, from a network perspective, it's almost over, right? It's January, so network plans are done, capital budgets are all being deployed. So I think you're going to see a lot more small cell sites be figured out in terms of fiber will be acquired for them or built for them, real estate will be acquired, and the infrastructure that's required to support large small cell networks in the beginnings of densification will start rolling into play, specifically the edge hoteling in which I think is another way to say smart edge data centers. And that's where we're building upon that. But I think right now you're actually seeing capital being deployed for it. You'll see a continuation of that throughout the year as we ramp up into this whole new world of densification. And one point about that, and just directionally, when we think about it, we've heard a couple of metaphors for 5G in that being compared to the advent of electricity, the internet, it's going to be a game-changing technology in so many ways because you'll be providing so much bandwidth to the end users and there'll be so much more mobility and then, of course, the IOT applications coming into play for quality of life. But I think this year you'll see a lot more capital spent on the broader small cell network and infrastructure deployments. Thank you, Mark. You stole a lot of my, sorry. It's all good. So, yeah, with respect to the coming year, obviously fiber densification has been a hot topic and builds continue. I believe that SD-WAN will continue to pervade the enterprise environment as well as into the service provider environment, meaning a lot of MSPs will pop up to provide the service, but I think a lot of enterprises will also take it upon their own to adjust their wide area networks and use this technology. And it's not really just for the network's sake. It's really going to be more to tune how an application acts on the network. So if I need to do a hybridization of my inside world versus my cloud world, SD-WAN is a really good tool to do that. So I think you'll see a lot more of that going on. The other piece we talked a few times about during this session is edge computing. I think that will, regardless of how fast or not 5G evolves and is deployed, I believe that edge computing will continue to be looked at, deployed, tuned, if you will, and worked more and more into folks' day-to-day networking activity, meaning from an application provider or managed service provider perspective. EdgeConnect and other folks like that doing this all the time. The other trend I think will definitely take off in the year is serverless computing and the use of containerization. That's something that obviously has been being used in the last year or two, but I think in the next year or so it should really start to accelerate as folks see the benefits of that from a CAPEX and operational expenditure perspective. The other trend is much more ephemeral, and that is the transition more from physical networking devices to virtual networking devices and the use of white box and network functions virtualization to be able to plant different virtual network functions on demand at different customer prems. Again, there are carriers who are already doing that. I believe that 5G will help drive that as far as the bandwidth and the fiber that's being laid in the ground to accommodate the speeds and other performance necessary to do that, as far as latency and things of that nature, but you'll see those trends moving as well. And then the two I just have is kind of throwaways. I believe the stock market will go up during 2018 at some point, and I think we will have the same president in the White House at some point in 2018. So I think I can take at least a couple of those to the bank moving forward. Some bold predictions there. Very bold, very bold, but I don't think you're talking about the Tech Ones either. Hey, Michael. Hi, well, I'll come at it from a different perspective, kind of the investment banking perspective. I think you're going to see a lot more fiber consolidation. All of our fiber clients seem to be for sale, and everybody else in the market for sale. So Cliff, I don't know if you guys are for sale, but I'll call after this. But I think you're going to see a lot of fiber consolidation, for one, because of the scale. I think you're going to start to see a lot of the fiber providers starting to offer more dark fibers. And Mark Lee, for example, has never offered dark fiber, and now they came out yesterday and said that they're big pro dark fiber folks. So that's kind of interesting. I think on the fixed wireless side, you're going to see a lot more competitive buys. We just have under LOI three of our fixed wireless clients selling now. That used to be a pariah in the telecom industry. And now carriers, wireless guys for backhaul, fiber folks to supplement their own reach. So you're going to see a lot more activity in the fixed wireless space. In the managed service space, I believe that all of these large UCAS companies will be bought this year. Ring Central, Vonage, 8x8, and they're going to be bought by people that none of us expect to buy. And I think that's going to be interesting. My other predictions are a little more out there. I think Roger Federal went two out of the four grand slams this year. The Jets still will not be in the Super Bowl. I think that one's pretty safe. Well, thank you, everybody. And I'll turn it back over to Jamie here. Yes, thank you, gentlemen. We've heard so many great bold predictions. Everything from edge hoteling, edge computing, fiber densification, SD wins, M&As, presidencies, Super Bowl wins. So thank you very much for your predictions. And again, our all-star panelist, Cliff Cain of Clarion, Mark Velafia of DataVision and Michael Crain of QAdvisors. And of course, our guest moderator today, Mr. Rob Powell of Telecom Ramblings. This wraps up our latest virtual CEO roundtable. And go ahead and meet Rob in person, as well as many of our panelists here and our JSA team. June 20th, Telecom Exchange, Hoboken, New Jersey. To feature your C-level here next time, go ahead and email us practjsa.net. Thanks for tuning in to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals, and JSA Radio, your voice for tech and telecom on iHeart Radio. Happy networking.