 the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott-Okataya of JSA. Joining me here today, we are honored to have Mr. Dean Campbell, he's the CTO of Light River Technologies. Dean, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Jamie. So it's a pleasure to have you this morning. Can you tell us from your CTO perspective a little bit about Light River? Sure, we are a technology integrator. There are a few things in the marketplace that make us a little bit unique over kind of all the other systems integrators and technology integrators you might see. One is the niche market that we fill. We only do carrier-class, mission-critical type of networks. So we're not a typical IT, LAN, WAN type of company. We work with mission-critical networks like E911 networks, smart grid networks used to deliver power to your house, those kinds of telecommunications networks. That's what we specialize in, very highly reliable, very high capacity, very manageable. And the second thing is, we're a multi-vendor in multi-technology. So where there's some competitors in the field that will represent one vendor or one small segment of the technology, we've really worked to become kind of students of the industry. We are partners with a number of the major manufacturers. We understand all their products. And with that, we're able to bring really a best-of-breed, best-in-class answer to our customers for their telecommunications needs. And you and your team have been clearly doing a great job at that. You are the 2016 recipient of the Best CTO and Transport Solutions and Most Innovative CTO Award by TMT News. So what about your role particularly at Light River? Do you feel contributed to that win? Well, to be honest, this was a team win. I played a part in it, but I have a team of some of the most wonderful individuals on the planet. They really do study the technology. They study the industries. And it allows us to put together very creative solutions for our customers that really meet their needs. From my part, what I've done is I've tried to find people that are smarter than me, which is really not that hard, but finding the best and the brightest and keeping them on the team is a challenge. And just giving them the ability and empowering them to go in and create new solutions to put things together in different ways for customers once they really understand what the customer needs. And if anything, I would say that's what we're best at is we're best at listening and understanding what the customer needs. I'd like to think that I had some part in helping to develop that among the team members. The other thing quite frankly as well is we spend a lot of time talking with vendors and technologists around the industry to understand where things are going. And we really try to impart a good deal of that vision. I call it kind of the technology binoculars to the team and by proxy from the team to the customers so they can make very good longer term decisions with regards to technology as well. Other than that, it's the hard work of quite a number of individuals that work on my team that put us up in this position. Yeah, great team and certainly great partners. One of which we understand, Wilcon, for folks who don't know, Wilcon is the premier West Coast provider of best in class fiber optic and data center infrastructure. And recently named one of Light River's key partners. Can you describe your history with Wilcon and how your companies are coming together? Yes, Wilcon is one of the companies that we've had an alliance with for quite a long time. In the marketplace, there's a few companies that we find that we just click with and Wilcon was one of those companies. They have the same mission statement that we do. They're all about finding the solution for the customer and making the customer as successful as possible. And that's been our mission statement as well since day one. So there was a natural fit with the two companies. We've worked with them for quite a long time, helping them understand the technology and roll out new and creative services on their own network. And working together, we've really begun to see that the two companies together providing solutions to the end customer really provide a solution that can't be matched in the area. We can help Wilcon provide new services on their network. We can help their customers get connected to the Wilcon network where needed. And then even in some cases, we can help their customers build their own private networks on dark fiber that Wilcon has provided. So we're empowering, working with Wilcon, empowering their customers to get the solution they need as quickly as they can. I love it. And speaking personally, I know both teams quite well and you both companies have for sure that customer focus and mind and everything you do and it's such a natural fit for sure. So tell me, how does dark fiber play into this? So that's an interesting question. So some changes in the marketplace, some changes in dynamics in terms of telecommunications have really started to feed much more of an interest in building your own private network using dark fiber acquired for some of the providers out there. I best explain it when I talk about the Facebook versus MySpace example. A number of these very, very large companies have realized that by escaping internet as their delivery mechanism and being able to get closer to their customers, in many cases building their own private networks, they're able to deliver their service just that little bit better, that little bit more responsive service, little bit more reliable service than you can get through a traditional carrier network and they have invested mightily and just that little bit of difference is the difference I say between Facebook and MySpace which is the point at which at least two people in the audience go, what's MySpace? Even though they're still out there. That kind of idea that you can really begin to enhance the products that you provide to your customers through having your own private network, kind of coupled with better technology, simpler technology, it doesn't really require rocket scientists to run a large optical network these days in a metro or regional or even national space. We have customers that are doing it with just several people. So when they begin to weigh the return on investment both tangible and intangible between buying carrier services and having to stitch together a network through multiple carriers, having to stitch together a network through multiple technologies, maybe some ethernet, some carrier ethernet, some sonnet still, being able to run their own network really provides them with an advantage that's tough for others in their marketplace to beat. And we see that significant rise that's coupled with really a little bit more available availability of dark fiber recently. For a while there was presumed to be a shortage. In reality the shortage was, the fiber was never where you needed it, there was plenty of fiber but never really close to where you needed it. But increasingly we're seeing a diversity of locations amongst the companies that are looking for dark fiber. So they're beginning to tap some of those reserves of dark fiber that were out there, costs have been coming down a little bit. And overall the companies are looking at the ROI of building their own network and becoming very excited about doing it. So partnering with Wilconn, we've tried to take that last little bit of angst out of building a private network. So the companies would have to originally go out, find the dark fiber, locate it, sign all the deals and then figure out how to light it, figure out what equipment they need. We working with Wilconn, Wilconn can provide the dark fiber, Light River is more than happy to step in and help the customer light that fiber with whatever their requirements are. So we can offer that customer, that end customer of Wilconn, we can offer them what is really a turnkey solution and kind of demystify building your own private network. That's what we found recently, that's been very successful. It makes perfect sense here, literally giving them a solution that's turnkey, removing those pain points, definitely needed in the previous way of dark fiber rollouts which were a bit painful. So wonderful, wonderful. Dean, thank you so much for being so generous with your time today and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV.