 Welcome to JSA TV the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of Kataya here at telecom exchange NYC With my good friend mr. Eric Ballard stream data centers Eric welcome back to JSA TV. Thank you. Welcome. Hi, Jamie How are you doing so great? And I want to say thank you again for returning here to telecom exchange or with me Of course in streams hometown Dallas Yeah, just a few months back yet so much has been happening. So we had to bring you back on Including a massive acquisition announcement of a hundred and fifty seven acre of land and In existing let me make sure I got this right four hundred and eighteen thousand square foot facility in Phoenix, Arizona Yep, actually a little outside Phoenix and Goodyear, Arizona So we're out in the West Valley out there and let me tell you it that four hundred and eighteen thousand square foot building It's a big building and we're in the process of wrapping up design work to redo that We're gonna do a lot of modifications to really take what is an existing industrial building and turn it into a data center product And you know that's gonna roll out. We'll bring that live kind of first quarter of next year We're gonna have an onsite substation 100% dedicated to us We have 126 extra acres to build on and we're gonna be building out there for quite a few years to come And we're gonna build one heck of a campus Eric It is always so exciting to talk to you. Tell me about any other project So, you know, we don't have a formal announcement yet, but I think that very soon We're gonna have something to announce in northern Virginia So I think you'll see stream coming into the northern Virginia market and doing something up there So, we love that headquartered in Virginia ourselves. We're we're we're big Virginia fans And I will say a lot's been going on northern Virginia. It's a good place to be. There's a few data centers up there And what are some of the stumbling blocks, would you say that? Enterprises face as they work to migrate their resource planning solutions to the cloud just changing topics there for you So, you know, I mean, there's so many stumbling blocks that a lot of enterprises can meet whether it be a Resource planning application or HR application or anything like that So, you know, the things that we see is a lack of understanding of how that cloud environment works A lot of security concerns security is a huge aspect of what's going on as people migrate resources to the cloud Yeah, absolutely a lot of conversation here at telecom exchange happening around security and the need for education So tell me how does stream go ahead and help with these companies overcome these challenges? You know, the number one thing that we do is we try to help with customer education making sure that our customers know That we are a resource and that we have tools and planning and resources available to them You know, we partner with people like Megaport to bring direct cloud connectivity and it can help with speed reliability security We still believe that the direct cloud connection to tether into the existing data center is absolutely the best path to the cloud and Offers companies the best security mechanisms. Yeah, I love my Megaport friends So great having the stream and Megaport logos together for sure. Now as enterprise workloads go ahead and increase and span multiple clouds How is stream positioning to let them run in the networking software that they need and where they want to be? So, you know, I mean first of all, we're a carrier neutral Planning neutral data center. I mean we we believe that our customers have the rights to come into our facility and do whatever They need to do. We don't want them to add, you know, we don't want them to be encumbered by anything that we put in place We get asked that the first question. Are you carrier neutral? Are you cloud neutral? The answer is absolutely yes We want our customers to have the flexibility to work with whoever they want whenever they want and You know, whatever whatever software it is that they need to run We hope to be able to help them and support them and whatever those goals are, you know Once again, we talk about Megaport. Megaport is very flexible and have a lot of Capabilities and APIs to be able to open those up, you know And we have other capabilities for cloud interconnection as well for our customers Absolutely, absolutely, and I do also love that you put a lot of emphasis on that holistic approach to security Increasingly multi-cloud environments coupled with emerging tech like AI. We're talking a lot about AI here today machine learning How do you see automation and Security going hand-in-hand from the ground up in data center operations. So, you know, I will say, you know I've been in the data center world now for about a decade and networks for a couple decades before that I think at this point, but you know automation is Absolutely the way of the future right we have to automate the processes because everything gets at a bigger scale But and with that has to go hand-in-hand has to be security as we look at building automation systems and you know the evolution of the data center the data center continues to grow the IoT aspect data centers have been IoT for the last 20 years It's really an adaptation of technologies with more and more sensors and more and more aspects to that And so we see that you know all of the AI and automation brings more capabilities More information to the data center providers such as ourselves to be able to offer More capabilities to our customers and be able to react to issues that might arise before they ever happen for sure yeah, and And we're hearing a lot about that today. We just got done actually with the humans and AI Roundtable where we're talking about safeguarding our networks and our data centers but but really the the whole sort of takeaway was that collaboration of Machine learning and and getting the best possible results fastest without human error But still that human oversight so So we're still putting our best our best what we do best as humans into play And certainly stream the leader there Yeah, we always have to have a human at the helm to make sure that they're making the smart decisions We can have there a lot of data and a lot of analytics and we use AI to process that data But at the end of the day, it's a human making those decisions. Yes, very important Well, always a pleasure speaking with you again such a thought leader. We love having you on Thank you for coming to our techs here in New York City and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking