 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Candice Sipos from JSA, coming to you from Virtual PTC 2021. Joining me today is Mike Janes, SVP of Business Development at DirectLine. Mike, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Excellent. We're happy you're here. First of all, let's just set the stage with a quick question about DirectLine. Could you just let our viewers know a little bit about DirectLine, what you all do, and who you serve? Yeah, absolutely. We're coming up on our 25th year anniversary. We've been in the telecom industry this whole time. Specifically, we work in the data center space. We work with many cloud companies and a lot of the vendors and manufacturers that build out the infrastructure for telecommunications. We're in APAC, we're in the US and Europe, and we're continuing expanding with some of the household names that we're all using now with COVID. Our industry is booming and we're continuing to grow with it and trying to expand and just keep up with the market. Our core competency is building out the physical infrastructure for the data center space. Excellent. Perfect. Thank you so much. DirectLine is sponsoring Virtual PTC this year. What's your main takeaway, your main message that you want to get across to the PTC audience? For us, PTC is a place where we find all the experts in the industry, from the land developers, to the data center owners, to the large carriers all in one place. It's a great venue. It allows a company like ours that would not necessarily have access to that group in a short amount of time. PTC, to have those thought leaders of the industry in one place and to be just in the audience is something very valuable to me and our company, but also the accessibility to a lot of these thought leaders is unique to this event. Now this year it's virtual but I still feel like that audience and that participation across all those layers is still wide open. For us, it's just been an invaluable event every year. This is our third year. This one's virtual, but we're very excited to continue with this new normal for however long it takes. Excellent. Great. You're officially celebrating your 10-year mark with DirectLine. You've been with the company since 2011. How have you seen the company evolve over the past decade? Lately, I think this is the obvious answer most people might give is just with COVID-19, people working from home, the amount of data being pushed through even this phone that I'm talking to you on, it's just 10 years ago, it didn't even seem possible. 12 years ago, I think I had a BlackBerry and it didn't have video, so the amount of infrastructure is mind boggling to me that these carriers and the large cloud providers have put in place through the different countries. If you go and look at just the intercontinental cabling that's been done, to me, that feeds directly to what we're doing right now. I don't know that the country that I'm in or the countries around the world could manage this situation without this type of infrastructure in place, and hats off to all the guys and gals that write code for this. Everybody that's the brains behind all this, because to me, this is like I'm watching Star Trek, if I want to date myself a little, that we're talking on video and then you're able to publish this. I think that's the biggest change in the industry is the ability for all this equipment and infrastructure to be put in place, and now to allow us to communicate better, and that communication is invaluable, whether it's 5G, whether I'm able to talk to my daughter remotely on a trip, and that's the biggest change in the industry. It's just made our lives a lot easier. I already thought the world was pretty simple, but this has really brought down barriers and allowed access, I think, to everybody to technology. Again, the thought leaders at this conference are making that happen. They're looking ahead. Sometimes we get stuck in our company where we're looking two or three years ahead. I feel like this event allows us to look 10 years ahead, and that's kind of what we're. 10 years ago at PTC, I'd be interested to see what they were talking about, because I bet it could have been something like what we're doing today. But yeah, the industry's changed a lot, but the world has changed a lot and it's kept up with it amazingly. Absolutely, so well said. And so what are the most common missteps that you see enterprises and data center operators taking when it comes to data center safety and quality? So safety and quality, it sounds a little trite, that it's important, but it is extremely important. And I think some of the mistakes on a high level is that you don't take it seriously. And when I say take it seriously, it's as simple as somebody wearing safety goggles in an environment where there really is no sharp tools, there's nothing that you would think could go wrong. And those are the situations where we find somebody drops something and it bounces and hits somebody in the face and you think, my gosh, thank goodness I had my goggles on. The obvious stuff I think as human beings we're aware of, we're not gonna jump into a burning building, but you do really have to take it seriously right down to those details. And in the data center space, there is a lot of electrical equipment, there's a lot of heating and cooling equipment going on. And you do at some point in our industry when you're in the infrastructure build phase, there's a lot of bodies moving back and forth. And I think the biggest misstep is just not taking the simple things seriously. It's almost like when you tell your children not to run with scissors, you almost have to tell adults, don't run with those scissors. And there is very, very well run safety protocol in the industry and you just have to manage it. For direct line, we've created a whole division around safety. We've created VPs and directors and managers that report up as a company overhead cost. We're not trying to recoup that cost. We just see it as the new normal and it's something all companies need to be very, very aware of and take it extremely seriously. And I would think the biggest misstep is just high level, not doing whatever you think you're doing constantly improve on it. And that's a never ending process. Absolutely. So let's end here with a trends question. So what trends are you seeing lately regarding cloud for data centers? A lot of what we do, we work with a lot of major manufacturers like Corning. And what we're seeing is a lot of cooling advancements on how to cool equipment with large manufacturers that sell equipment. We're seeing the cost of fiber optics going down but also the amount of single mode fiber in the industry is kind of outpaced even 10 years ago what we would consider connectivity for a data center. Very little copper, a lot less what I'll say is a multi mode fiber. And the optics on the equipment is catching up with the ability of the speed of light basically on a single mode cable, which is why we can do the things we do which is download a video and watch it live in your car while you're driving wherever you're driving wherever your kids are driving, not the driver. And I think for us, I think the ability to get a lot more physical infrastructure in a smaller space. And we work with a lot of the leading cloud providers and also a lot of the social networking firms. And I just know firsthand that the amount of space and cooling needed to what they put in this space a lot today is a lot less. I mean, it's remarkably less. And even though we're advancing and continuing to grow, I think the industry is getting smarter and smarter on how to do a lot more in a lot smaller space which is allowing us, again, like I mentioned earlier to do a lot of throughput through the small, through my phone up to a satellite back to your audience. And it couldn't happen any other way. And the industry is just, as it always has been, it seems to be one step above ahead of everybody else. Excellent, what a great way to wrap it up. So where can viewers who are interested in learning more about DirectLine? Where can they go to learn more? No, we have a booth at PTC. So that's one way to go. And I think that's probably the easiest way. There's also, you can go to our website, which is dlglobal.com. And our contact information is again on the attendee list at PTC. That's probably the easiest way. And we would love to talk to anybody just about the industry and just get smarter ourselves and share ideas. Excellent, okay, great. Well, you heard it here, dlglobal.com. Definitely check that out. And thank you so much, Mike, for your time. Thank you, we appreciate it. Really, and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.