 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast. The newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Noland here in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 20. Joining me now is Ken Adams, the Vice President of Market Development at NetSapiens. Welcome Ken. Good morning. Aloha. Aloha. Well, tell us about what's been happening in NetSapiens in the Asia-Pacific region. You've been having a lot of success over the last year. Tell us what's been happening. So it's interesting. We have an actual partner company over there that we have a JV agreement with. So we have a small stake in the company. Asia is a completely different market, as you can guess, from dealing with the U.S. market. So over there you have to have someone on the streets like a local agent to do business with. And so the partnership started that way. So the partnership has now grown and we're really focusing in on how to increase basically phone use in the hospitality space, which as we all know, phones on the nightstand in the hotel room are not useful anymore, right? So we're trying to change that market a little bit over there. I'll go into some more detail as we talk. Tell us about some of the unique requirements. You mentioned it's a different ballgame in the Asia-Pacific area. Specific requirements service providers and enterprises. How does that safety and bridge that gap? Right. So again, with the partnership that we have there, there are a software company that develops back of house software for the hospitality industry. And coupling that with our solution with the UC platform, we can give the hotel staff all the way to the hotel guest access to order food, access to call each other, access to set up a spa appointment when I'm out and about in Hong Kong, just from the touch of my phone, right? So we're really trying to create like a niche for the hotel space, for the operators of the hotel, right? To bring people back in and order. It's all about ordering more food and room service, right? And ordering towels and things like that. So we're really trying to make that really easy by doing IoT integrations, like show me a video of the spa and it pops up on the TV, in room ordering on a desk phone with the Android display where they can say send me a cheeseburger and fries right there. So those are the kind of things we're working on there. The challenges, however, are in Asia, the infrastructure is not as robust as our infrastructure is in the United States. So in a lot of cases bandwidth can be an issue. So we have to work with the customers there to overcome those issues. And it's still a very much taboo in the business place to put things on the cloud. Personally, however, the Asians over there, everything's on an app on their phone. So consumer wise, they're all set to go. It's the businesses that are a little bit slow to adopt. So that's what we're trying to overcome there. Well, recent statistics show that 80% of service provider revenues occur above the infrastructure, infrastructure rather. How does your recently launch programs help the service providers help those businesses that you say maybe a little slower to adopt and take to get onto the program? Right. So what we basically did was we took the care of the hardware management and the co-location management out of the customer's hands, which allows them to get into business faster and all that kind of things because they don't have to worry about buying and sourcing their own servers and then finding someone who knows how to program the servers and command line Linux and some things like that. So we basically took that expertise out of their hands, they can get that through us. So that's just one layer of making it easier to do business with us. So now all they have to worry about is the unified communications snap solution level. They don't have to worry about the hardware level. I want to talk now about moving into service providers, boosting their own profitability. Want to transition to a little segue of sessions not seats. So tell us what that means and how that's impacting the Asia Pacific region. Absolutely. So sessions not seats has been around since the beginning of the company. It was a decision that was made to sell that way purposely, because when you look at the competitors out there, they're selling based on the feature sets that the consumers are using, that the businesses are using. And you have to continue to buy those feature set packs. Therefore your license cost goes up exponentially and it doesn't matter if it's a desk phone or an actual user, that feature cost is still there and you can't make any money back on that. It's a sunk cost. So when you license based on concurrent session usage and you give all the features, that opens the door for the service providers to price in a lot of different ways. So the ROI comes a lot quicker because we can get down to based on the number of sessions about a dollar or less a month per seat. So our service providers can generate quite a lot of revenue if they actually go out and try not to price like everyone else out there. The message has been for the last few years, it's like be different, price differently because you have a different license model and you can do that. So it's been really well received. And I think with some of the acquisitions going on in the industry and things like that, it's pushed a lot more people to look into Netsapiens and that model specifically. The feature sets are there regardless of what competitor platform you're on. So what differentiates you? It's things like the way you're licensed. And the other thing is how is the UX? How is the feel, the design of the platform and how easy is it for the business end user to utilize? So those are the two areas we really differentiate in. And our platform, you know, I've worked on multiple different platforms over my lifetime and our customers come from having other platforms as well. And one of our biggest features outside of the sessions at Seats is definitely our portals and the ease of use of our portals. We hear that time and time again and we continue to make those easier and easier for people to use. Any big news coming up for you guys soon? Big news. Well, we have a new release coming out at the end of February. So there's a lot of new feature sets in there, including enhancements to our video product and a number of other things within the platform. So that's probably going to be a very well received, large release. So there's a lot of feature changes and functionality ads into that release that we're looking forward to and our customer base is looking forward to. We haven't figured out what's coming out later in the year yet, so I can't share any of those details. Stay tuned. Exactly. Where can our viewers go to learn more about NetSapiens? Easy. NetSapiens.com. There's all kinds of information there. Go over to our information portal on there. You can download all kinds of white papers and stuff about what we do. And go download the sessions, that seats, white paper. A lot of information in that one. All right. You heard it right here. Thank you, Ken, for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day. And thank you, viewers, for joining JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.