 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for tech, telecom and data center professionals. Buffy Hierarchitas coming to you from fabulous Las Vegas for Channel Partners 2022. And joining me today is Mike Cobb, Vice President of Channel Sales for Unite Private Networks. Mike, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure and it's so great to see you here at Channel Partners. I know this isn't your first time at Channel Partners. Why don't you give us a little bit more details about UPN and your channel program? So first I want to say it's really great to be back here. The energy of this room is really incredible. I had, I don't know, 40 some odd meetings over the past two days and not one time did COVID come up. So that was exciting to not have to discuss this time around. So I'm the Vice President of the channel for Unite Private Networks. We are a fiber infrastructure company in the Midwest headquartered in Kansas City. We've been in the business for 20 some years, 1998 started and just recently stood up our channel program over the past two years and had a lot of success. Yeah, I saw that you recently launched the channel program in 2020 right in the height of the pandemic. Can you give us a little bit more insight about what you see coming up the pike for the channel program? Sure. So one of the, you know, big things that we've seen and I've noticed to lately, you know, we talked about trends a little bit, right? So SD-WAN, we have DDoS, partners are getting into a lot, very deep into their customers network. But one of the things that I think is really cool is the fiber infrastructure has become much more relevant, I believe now than it ever has before. Our partners are starting to ask us for things like private networks for their customers. So the deployment of the fiber is really much more mission critical than it ever has been before. That's one of the biggest trends I see in my space. Yeah, you're such a ventrin in the space. So before joining UPN, you know, you've started several channel programs over the course of your career. Where do you see the channel heading? So nowhere but up, right? You know, with Unite Private Networks, we see a significant portion of our business coming through partners where it didn't before. So I think this community of partners just goes up the stack every year. We get deeper and deeper into bigger and bigger customers. And I don't think that's going anywhere. But as the networks become more complex, as, you know, COVID changed a lot of things. And I think these partners, our customers rely on these partners to help them solve those things. Yeah, we're going to quote you on that, Mike. So the channel is going nowhere but up. That's certain. And we're seeing that here in this room, like you said, the energy, the vibe. This is the biggest channel partners to date, over 7,000 attendees. And it was such a pleasure to have you here today. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Yeah, you know, I would just say that, you know, keep going, right? The channel is fantastic. Our industry is fantastic. We're doing really well with the partner community. We want to continue to do that. Our company's behind it. And, you know, it's great to see, you know, a lot of times you see 30, 40, you know, 50 new companies here at this show every year relying on this partner community to help them launch their products and services and get them out there. So it's fantastic. Yeah, the channel is stronger than ever. And Mike, tell viewers where they can go to find out more about UPN. So you can go to UnitePrivateNetworks.com or you can reach out to me directly at mike.com at upnfiber.com. Mike, thanks again for joining us for another fabulous episode of JSA TV here at Channel Partners 2022. Happy channel networking.