 A TV newsroom, live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of the telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, executive vice president at JSA, and joining me, as always, is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skado-Katya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you. Thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly. But our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out. And all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record-breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. It sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow. That glow. No, no, I couldn't make it this year. But fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure, and the networks within. I'm Allison Whelan. And welcome to day two of Metro Connect USA 2024 here in beautiful Fort Lauderdale. Joining me today is Jeff Quinn, VP of Technology and Innovation from Sage Management. Jeff, welcome. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. Fort Lauderdale is great. This is my first Metro Connect. Glad to be here. Yeah, it's not bad when you're around palm trees, right? Yeah, that's right. When you wake up with palm trees, it's going to be a good day. So for those who may be a little bit unfamiliar, I'm sure everyone's already heard of you guys. What is Sage Management? What do you guys do? Sure. Sage Management is a software and solution provider. We typically provide services to wholesale buyers, allowing them to reduce their costs and optimize their spend. Yeah, so I'll leave it there. Everyone likes to save, right? Yeah, that's right. So I'm sure you have a lot of friends here. And we've done that for 20 years. And we've saved our clients over $4 billion a year today. And we continue to generate more than $250 million a year in cost savings for our clients. And we're just excited about what we're doing and the opportunity to help our clients. $4 billion, that is exciting. That's a big number. And I know tomorrow is an exciting day for you guys as well. You have a Sage sponsored panel. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that panel? Maybe give us a preview? Sure, yeah. So the panel is really talking about how automation in the wholesale telecom space is going to improve network optimization and also improve the customer experience. And automation of course is key for the telecom industry just to move forward, to gain those kinds of efficiencies. And then improving the customer experience is always important. There's going to be a lot of wholesale telecom providers that a buyer can buy from. And as a seller, you want to provide the best solution possible. So that's what will be discussed in the panel. Where Sage is coming from, I think it's kind of interesting because we're not in the flow of the presales and the decision making on buying the wholesale services. But where we come in on the backside is creating efficiency to ensure that the costs are managed as quickly and efficiently as possible because as automation kind of drives revenue very quickly, new revenue, new revenue is going to be, what we don't want to have is the back office cost associated with managing those expenses end up being a drag on the whole process. So our goal is to make the backend as efficient and effective as sort of the automation is driving on the front end of the process. Efficient automation for an ideal customer experience. Exactly. Great. And we have that great panel tomorrow. So what's on the horizon for Sage? Yeah, so after at a high level, Sage has been providing services for 20 years, primarily driving cost optimization for buyers. Some of that includes disputes that they open with their sellers. Our goal now over the next 20 years and frankly, I hope less than that, is to actually a limit between buyers and sellers. We're gonna do that with blockchain technology. There's private blockchain solutions. There's public blockchain solutions and we're trialing. We have a new beta service coming out just next month in March that will actually allow for certain element of access charges around SLA credits to be eliminated as a dispute between buyers and sellers. And so it comes out in March, it's really a big focus of mine and ours at Sage for 2024. We expect to roll out a production version of this later this year. And we're excited to see this then evolve into then other phases on the roadmap, which will then again lead to the elimination of disputes because I can assure you neither buyers nor sellers like the dispute. Right, we're working towards a dispute-free future. Right, and I think we're the ones to be the independent third party that allows that to happen. That's great. Thank you so much for joining us. And if viewers want to go to learn more, they wanna connect with you. Where can they do that? Sure, so that's sagemi.com or of course on LinkedIn, Jeff Quinn. All right, well, thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us. It was great getting to chat with you. Appreciate it. And thank you viewers for tuning in. Until next time, happy networking. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scatochettia, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what they did. Everyone had that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the Movers and Shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your Movers and Shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Miller as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Invota, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Invota, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Invota. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. And swish, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country. And they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. Let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Tana Quinn's Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands, including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's good to me. Good one. All right. How can I follow up? I don't know. All right, Link Nova recently marked their 10 year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Desire Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Link Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Link Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers. And energy is a big thing right now. Legrand's Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month. And it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once. And I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Friends over a 1623 front. And by the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generators at their Omaha facility, adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 Farnum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm making sure everything's got enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right, excellent. Now, Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay, guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions, and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay, here we go. Legrand's made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE Systems, a California-based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE Systems is advantageous for Legrand as ZPE Service Delivery for Edge Environments will compliment Legrand's line of cabinets, PDU switches, and fiber. Interesting. Also two of the biggest names in digital infrastructure announced a new deal this past month. Guys, get ready, American Tower and IBM teaming up, y'all. American Tower, set to include IBM hybrid cloud platform to all of its access edge data center ecosystem. Big news, guys. It's also leveraging 5G and AI at the edge. AI at the edge. Jamie, I think we're gonna need to get used to hearing about AI this year. What do you think? I'm thinking that's like the topic of 2024. I agree. Yes, yes, yes. Our new future. DartPoints recently announcing their new partnership with Virtuous AI. The company makes custom AI models, which DartPoints plans to use for tackling challenges in data delivery, storage, and processing. Talk about a smart move. Sounds like a smart move, Jay, but more big partnership news coming from in the form of Connect-Based joining, we love Connect-Based, by the way. Connect-Based joining forces with Carbon Technologies, that's Q-A-R-B-O-N technologies. The new alliance will combine Connect-Based's customer network with Carbon's Lattice SAS orchestration software. This is hot on the heels of their previous acquisition of Master Stream, a pricing and quoting platform for telecom companies. Connect-Based cannot stay out of the news right now. No, no, awesome, awesome. All right, let's go ahead and check in on the New York Hudson Valley area, right, where Archtop Fiber has been busy bridging the digital divide. You know, we love these stories. They've acquired three regional carriers there in the last five months, including, most recently, Warwick Valley Telephone. Congratulations, guys. This new addition will be rebranded as WVT Fiber, and Archtop has already begun to deploy the fiber needed to deliver high-speed internet access to their newly acquired end users. It's a great story all around. Yeah, Archtop has no joke. They are getting it done out there in the Hudson Valley. So congrats to them. Over here in the Midwest, LightEdge started the year by expanding into Minneapolis. They acquired 76,000 square feet of 3.6 megawatt data center space to mark their 12th facility and their first in Minnesota. That's one way to ring in the new year. Congrats to our friends over there at LightEdge. Meanwhile, by the way, Ben with IG leaving their heart in San Francisco on purpose with their new expanded network into the Bay Area. This month, they announced a new project that will install the first marine cable in the San Francisco Bay in over 20 years, two decades, guys. So that's really cool. Wow, true story, Jay. My grandfather used to play. I left my heart in San Francisco on the organ they had in their family room when I was a kid. Oh, my God. Yeah, no, I miss my grandfather. But anyway, back to this. Powerhouse data centers stayed true to their name this month by announcing not one but two new expansion projects. The first one is right in data center alley with a new site in Northern Virginia called Powerhouse95. The second big expansion is their first one outside of Virginia. This one is called Powerhouse Reno. It's located in Nevada. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perine, executive vice president at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scatochettia, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what we're doing. We did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the Movers and Shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your Movers and Shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Metler as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SaaS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Invota, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Uru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Invota including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Invota. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation and here we go. Oh, wait, that was you, sorry. That's okay, and swish, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana LED who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called an MR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. Snack room, let's get the word out here. Welcome to JSA TV where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. I'm Allison Whelan coming to you live from Metro Connect USA 2024 in beautiful Fort Lauderdale and joining me today is Bob Thompson, CEO of Underline Infrastructure. Bob, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me Allison, it's a pleasure. Of course. So we're just chatting a little bit. You have such a diverse background. What inspired you to found Underline? Well, the short version of the story is while I spent 25 years working as a banker, I took a bit of a weird detour and spent the better part of 18 months working in Haiti after the earthquake back in 2010. Oh wow. So the reason I share that is it was in Haiti managing three of the refugee camps that I got kicked in the face with what I call my American ignorance about critical infrastructure. We all naively take for granted that water comes out of the spout and the lights work and so forth. But I was in a place where I would say I was very morally responsible for the well-being of about 4,300 people. And there was no power and no telecoms and the water was killing people. That experience started me on what's now a 10 year plus personal research project. What I would call the role of critical infrastructure in the fabric of communities. To the point where in 2018, I gave my wife the good news I was gonna quit and otherwise pretty good job and tried to start a company that could actually do something about transforming the capacity of American communities to flourish. So the background of Underline is just that. Our mission is to deliver the critical infrastructure from a connectivity perspective that's necessary for American cities to flourish. Yeah, what a wonderful mission and thank you for everything you're doing. That sounds like it really changed the trajectory of things there, that trip, huh? It really did. To call it life altering is an understatement. Wow, well that's an amazing story. And what are some ways that you're seeing open access networks changing from the technology side of things right now? Well, there's a lot of different business models operating under the banner of open access ranging from purely wholesale fiber focused on the residential internet problem. All the way to the other side of the spectrum which is where we operate. We build single multi-purpose fiber networks capable of serving every single segment in the market from a poor family on government subsidized internet access all the way to complicated enterprise and local municipal utilities. So from a technology perspective, we would say community need needs to drive the technology. So communities need cyber secure foundations to modernize their other infrastructure. So that's where we believe the technology has to go and open access. Emphasis on cybersecurity, emphasis on capital efficiency, multi-purpose multi-use infrastructure but also the transformation of fiber into a delivery mechanism for innovators. So the underlying platform of technologies is built to sit on top of our own fiber or to snap on top of someone else's fiber and bring it to life. And we think that's where the technology has to go. Of course, and so that's the technology side. What are you seeing from the business economic side of things? Well, again, there's a lot of smart people and a lot of capital here in this conference that are focused on different segments of the market. People are building residential internet optimized fiber. There are people building fiber, targeting the enterprise, et cetera. From our perspective, the cost of putting fiber under the ground is the same for all of us properly done. So we don't wanna serve one segment, we wanna serve every segment. And I think that's where the economics will drive the activity, but it's also more complicated and requires more technology. So we're early in the evolution of the market, but I think the economics will drive toward multi-purpose infrastructure. Yes, insightful. And I know you're speaking on a panel. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Maybe give us a preview or key takeaways that you want attendees to leave with? Sure, I'm quite frankly, I'm really appreciative of the chance to speak with this group. The panelists range from Utopia, which I give a lot of credit. They were early to the notion of open access internet to sci-fi and ubiquity, rock, et cetera. It's a great group of experienced people. Each of us are doing things a little bit differently. Again, we are an infrastructure technology company first and foremost. So I would say with no disrespect to anybody else's business model, we've just taken a different approach. So it's gonna be an interesting discussion. There's some serious divergence of opinion among the group about how the future should unfold. So it should be a pretty fun panel. Good, good. I think we'll have to add that one to our agenda. Well, please come see us, 12 o'clock. Yes, 12 o'clock. Well, thank you so much for joining us. If our viewers wanna go to learn more about Underline, where can they go to either connect with you or go to learn more? Very simple, it's underline.com. Underline.com. Easy to find. Well, keep an eye out for Bob and that panel and head to underline.com to know more. Thank you viewers for tuning in and thank you for joining me. My pleasure, thank you Allison. Until next time, happy networking. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV Newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me, as always, is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scatochettia, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out and all here is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that K&N rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't wanna miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SaaS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta, definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. That's okay. And swoosh, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here into the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services, and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big, high-barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country. And they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek, both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot, created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tune for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? I mean, that's the snack room. Let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Tonnequin's Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands, including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's good to me. Good one. All right, how can I follow up? I don't know. All right, Lynx Nova recently marked their 10-year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Deser Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Lynx Nova can access network solutions. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from Leavers and Global Connectivity, digital infrastructure, and the networks within. I'm Allison Whelan, coming to you live from Metro Connect USA 2024, here in beautiful Fort Lauderdale. And joining me today is Gustavo Peria and Jeff Theria of Elia Digital Data Centers. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for joining me. Good to be here. Nice to be here. Of course. So to dive right in, Gustavo, you have so much experience, 16 years in telecom with technical leaders and large internet servers. Can you tell us a little bit more about Elia's platform and its growing presence? Sure. So Elia is the eco-friendly digital infrastructure data center in Brazil, right? We intend to provide an easy and profitable entrance to Brazilian market, okay? Taking to our customers a hyperscale ready platform and also an edge strategy, right? So we can help our customers to bridge the digital gap that we have in Brazil. Okay, bridging that gap. And you just mentioned strategy, which leads right into our next question. Your data center strategy, how does that serve hyperscalers and large enterprises? Yes, so the hyperscalers needs to offload their traffic, right? Sometimes we help them connecting our edge data centers. So our edge customers can achieve the traffic that is hosted in the main cities. But also we help the hyperscalers to host this content as close as we can to the edge, right? So taking hyperscalers to the outside of the tier one cities of Brazil, like Brasilia, Curitiba and Porto Alegre, we are also helping the country itself, right? To improve and move forward. That's wonderful. And I think that's the benefit too, is that we have multiple like markets within Brazil, right? So we're in São Paulo, we're in Rio, we have capacity in both markets to be able to serve not only our existing clients, but then the hyperscale large cloud clients. And so that's like attractive to them. But as he mentioned, right? We're in Brasilia, we're in Curitiba, we're in Porto Alegre. And so those are markets that they're going to need to be closer to the eyeballs. And so we already have those clients establishing footprints in those markets, be able to serve the entire country. The ability to hit those larger and smaller areas equally. It's a good combination. Yeah, sometimes we do it through the ISP that we host over there. IXBR is also hosted in every of our data centers. So we are always trying to enable the connectivity that's what we do. Enablement across Brazil, right? And so how is it supported in its long-term plans to expand capacity across Brazil further? Right, so we're well positioned, as I said, with the assets we have. We have growth capabilities in some of the key markets. We just built out and expanded Porto Alegre. We're going to expand in São Paulo to have two additional sites that will allow us to grow and have additional capacity for not only our existing clients, but also for the hyperscale for the large cloud clients to be able to be in São Paulo in some differentiated areas. We have expansion capabilities in Rio and Brasilia for significant upside for the cloud guys. So I think that allows us from a platform standpoint to not only kind of grow in our existing footprint, but we also have other markets that we could grow and expand into other cities within Brazil. Right now we're almost entirely Brazil focused because there's enough capacity, there's enough need and demand that tells us we don't need to go to other markets right now. And so that's, it's beneficial, right? You have one culture, one currency, one language, and a team that is really well done. We have really good partners there from an investment side. And I serve on the board now. When I was at Goldman, we made the investment in Alia. So we have the support of Goldman Sachs as a kind of international global kind of financial sponsor. And then we have sponsors locally that really kind of help kind of manage the business day to day, hire folks like Gustavo and others that have really built the management team. And so I think we're well positioned to be able to kind of take on additional capacity, kind of deploy additional capital and grow the business significantly over the next probably couple of years. Yeah, it sounds like strategic expansion to keep up with that growth and stay ahead of that. Yeah, I think a lot of other kind of platforms and certainly other parts of us, I would say South America and Latin America are attractive. I just think from our standpoint, there's enough for us to do in our existing markets to expand, maybe pick a couple other key markets within Brazil and expand there and really kind of be more focused kind of on execution. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing all of this expansion continue and the additional headlines that you guys, I'm sure we'll make in the coming years to follow. But for our viewers who want to learn more, I want to connect with you guys. Where can they go to do that? Yes, just like Alea website, we are in the LinkedIn as well. Just look forward for our posts, our news and contact. All right, gentlemen, well, thank you so much for joining me. It was great getting to chat with you and talk about Brazil and to our viewers. Thank you so much for watching. Until next time, happy networking. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skadokataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance and I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. It sounded like a total blast, beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast and Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that, that's for sure. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those, they were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't wanna miss out on. And you know what, for me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely, very, very, very cool that it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the Movers and Shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward, here is your Movers and Shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure, very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a long time SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Envolta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Envolta including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Envolta, definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation and here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. That's okay. And swish, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big fine bar just that. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana LED who supplies lighting for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places but of course now Vancouver another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called an MR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate. Welcome to JSA TV where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. My name is Emily Sherer for JSA and I am joined today by Brian Hasagawa from Light River. He is the chief financial officer and chief operating officer. Welcome Brian, it's great to have you here. Thank you for having me. Absolutely, so from what we've seen and heard 2023 was a great year for Light River so we would love to hear a little bit more about some of those key successes and some of the things that made you successful last year. Yeah, 2023 for Light River was a banner year for us. You know, after several years of supply chain disruption I think we're finally kind of getting through that and able to capitalize on the pent up demand that was there. So our service delivery team, our software solutions teams were really able to step in, help out and drive the great top line results as well as bottom line. Excellent, great and any specific successes you wanna share or any recent news that you've had? Yeah, yeah, so we've had some great wins with our hyperscalers as hyperscalers, they're really big into the AI and our service delivery team was able to really expand on that and deliver kind of like long haul routes, provide the services that they absolutely need right now as they deal with this explosive growth that is fueled by AI. Excellent, great, great. We've heard so much about AI so excellent growth that you're seeing there. Now a couple of months into 2024 here what aspects of the market landscape from 2023 do you believe will serve as strong tailwinds for light rivers continued growth and how is light river position to capitalize on some of those trends? Yeah, 2023 was an interesting year. After years I would say of kind of like free money it became a year of efficiency and a path to profitability, a focus of profitability was being pushed down on the companies. And one of the panelists here said I get all that but how do I meet the demand with discipline? And I think that's where light river can really help in that we can supplement we can compliment all these pare down teams that exist with our network services solutions our software solutions. How do we essentially automate people's job? How do we make them more efficient? That's where light river can really step in and that's been a tailwind for us. So that path to profitability actually just generated more business for us as people are looking for partners to help them out. Basically meet that demand with discipline as the panelists said. Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like 2024 is gonna be just as successful as 2023 was for you all. Yeah, Steph, I look looking forward to a really strong 2024. Good, excellent, excellent. Now we've heard about the potential challenge of sustained interest rates affecting cash use for companies like light river and can you shed some light on how the company plans to tackle that obstacle while maintaining its growth trajectory for 2024? Yeah, as the mantra goes cash is king. For us, we've been very lucky that our debt levels were pretty sustainable. They're not exorbitant to the point where we have to pay down tons of tons of money on interest expense, which some P-back firms have to deal with. So for us, it has been more of how do we invest properly? How do we invest appropriately into our own business? And that really is investing in our people. So for us, how do we kind of navigate through that is to identify the right people, the right talent, invest in that and make sure that we're using our capital properly and the people that we have. And that will kind of sustain our growth and essentially support our growth for the future. Yeah, absolutely. The right people make all the difference. So great, great, well good luck with that. Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian. Is there anything else you wanna add today? No, this is great. Thank you so much for having me. Great, enjoy the show. And to our viewers, happy networking and keep tuning in for more interviews from Metro Connect. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scadokataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. It sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what we did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely, very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. The courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Miller as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too. I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SPP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. That's okay. And swoosh, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here into the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country. And they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tune for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology. It's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? I mean, snacks in the snack room. Let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Tonnequin's EdgeX data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center and we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one. Good one. All right, how can I follow up? I don't know. All right, Link Nova recently marked their 10 year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are. Microsoft Desire Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Link Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Link Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers and energy is a big thing right now. Legrand's Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month and it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once and I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Friends over a 1623 front. And by the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generation, three new generators at their Omaha facility adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 Farnum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm making sure everything's got enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right, excellent. Now, Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay, here we go. Legrans made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE Systems, a California based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE Systems is advantageous. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, executive vice president at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skado-Katya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out. And all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what we're doing. We did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. No, no, I couldn't make it this year. But fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a long time SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. Involta is number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. And swoosh, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here into the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services, and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lighting for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. Snack room, let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Toniquin's Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one, all right. How can I follow up? I don't know, all right, Link Nova recently marked their 10-year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Deser Peering Service. Now, all Peering partners at Link Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Link Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers. And energy is a big thing right now. Legrand's Starline brand unveiled the M70 Critical Power Monitor this month. And it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once. And I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Our friends over at 1623 front, and by the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generators at their Omaha facility adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 Farnum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm making sure everything's got enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right, excellent. Now, Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay, guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions, and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay, here we go. Legrans made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE Systems, a California-based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE Systems is advantageous for Legran as ZPE service delivery for edge environments will compliment Legran's line of cabinets, PDU switches, and fiber. Interesting. Also, two of the biggest names in digital infrastructure announced a new deal this past month. Guys, get ready, American Tower and IBM teaming up, y'all. American Tower set to include IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform to all of its access edge data center ecosystem. Big news, guys. It's also leveraging 5G and AI at the edge. AI at the edge. Jamie, I think we're gonna need to get used to hearing about AI this year. What do you think? I'm thinking that's like the topic of 2024. I agree. Yes, plus, plus. Yeah, our new future. Welcome to JSA TV. We are live here from Metro Connect in sunny Fort Lauderdale. And we're bringing you the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. My name is Emily Scherer for JSA. I am joined today by Dave LeBlanc. He is the VP of strategy and corporate development with AFL Global. Dave, welcome. It's great to have you. Thanks, Emily. It's really great to be here. AFL's first time at this show and we're a little bit of a newbie. And a lot of people don't know about us. We're a kind of full service optical communication company, principally in the product space, making fiber optic cables, connectivity, kind of the backbone of what makes our industry work, as well as kind of an inside plant and outside plant services capability as well. So we really see ourselves as a one-stop shop for putting in place the passive elements of optical networking. And our most recent foray is now into the wireless space where we are have carved out a little bit of an interesting niche where they were the premium provider of wireless services for sports venues, including the NFL and the NBA and Major League Baseball. Yeah, that is so exciting. So the technology you're providing is keeping people connected when they're attending those events. Is that right? 100%, that's really our core mission. Yeah, that's so exciting. Yeah, that's really, really fun. So that's excellent. Now, as you said, you kind of keep the companies, a lot of the companies that are here at Metro Connect kind of running behind the scenes. So what are some of the trends that your customers are seeing that you think are gonna be huge for 2024? Well, we really kind of serve three markets and reach are in a different place. So our hyperscale customers today, it's all about just scaling to meet the demand. The amount of growth as we've heard all week here is just unprecedented. And as a manufacturer, it's a significant hurdle to make sure that we have the capacity support that needs the industry. In our broadband space, we really serve kind of tier two, tier three service providers and the kind of elective cooperatives. And they are figuring out being BABA impact on their growth plans. And in parallel to that, we're preparing to meet that demand by making sure that we're compliant with the on-sharing requirements that we have part of the portfolio. And then we also have a presence in kind of grid modernization. And that's, I think, an area where we see is a longer-term opportunity where the industry is, I think, still figuring out what that means. So we really like the fact that we have immediate today, we have prepare for, and then there's what's gonna happen in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so important to have a partner like you who's up on all the trends and all the compliance. So excellent. Thanks for sharing that with us. Now, as far as 2024 plans, what's coming up for AFL Global? What's on the horizon? Any news that you wanna share with our viewers today? Yeah, well, a bunch of interesting stuff. We've just recently announced the opening of our new connectivity plant in Poland, which is supporting our hyperscale customers across Europe. As I said, we just completed an acquisition that cemented our place in the wireless space. And we continue to see that as real growth opportunity, DAS and millimeter wave. And then we've also done, have some really interesting projects that we're working on in Australia in the science and sector that are kind of global, hard to describe, but global projects that create antennas for studying the universe. And we're delivering kind of the cable and connectivity to these massive array antennas in Australia, which is just kind of a fun project to be part of. We're really busy and really excited and moving fast. Yeah, you've got a ton of great projects. I mean, the NFL, the work in Australia that you're doing it all very important to have that cable and that backline infrastructure. So, excellent. Is there anything else that you wanna share? Maybe tell our viewers where they can go to learn more about AFL Global. Sure, well, if you've never heard about us, don't feel bad, most people haven't, but you can find more about us at aflglobal.com. And we're always looking forward to meeting new people, having new conversations and telling our story. Great, excellent. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And to our viewers, thanks for tuning in and happy networking. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV Newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scato-Kataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record-breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkiss. I was very jealous of that, that's what I'm doing. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those, they were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't wanna miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely, very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure, very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Metler as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SPP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta, definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation and here we go. Oh wait, that was you, sorry. That's okay, that's okay. And swish, collaboration and innovation, here we go. And now we're here into the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana LED who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine-tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. Let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Toniquin's Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one. All right. How can I follow up? I don't know. All right, Lynx Nova recently marked their 10-year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Desire Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Lynx Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Lynx Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers. And energy is a big thing right now. Legrand's Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month. And it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once. And I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure, and the networks within. My name is Emily Scherer for JSA. We are here at Metro Connect in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And I am joined today by Bill Severn. He is the president and CEO of 1623 Farnham. They are a Midwest connectivity hub and edge data center leader. Bill, it's great to have you here. Thanks, Emily. It's glad to be here. Absolutely. So let's talk about you first. You were recently appointed as CEO and president after working with the organization's parent company for a long time. So congratulations. That's very exciting. Thank you. And what does this transition mean for you and for 1623? Yeah, great question. So we've been really fortunate the last five years to have Todd Cushing as our president and CEO. And he shared a common vision with us of what 1623 could be if it was properly invested in. We completed that journey and Todd retired at the end of the year and I stepped into his role. It's been really exciting so far and really looking forward to great things. Absolutely. Well, congratulations again. That's so exciting. And you're not the only one who has cause to celebrate. So you also appointed a new VP of infrastructure and facility in Eric Flock. And so how does this move align with driving value for the entire 1623 ecosystem? Yeah, really good. We're really proud of Eric. Eric has been with the company eight years. He really dedicated himself to learning the facility, learning all the new metrics in the new facility and has done a wonderful job managing that and clients. And so it's well deserved. I'm really looking forward to working with Eric over the next several years. It's gonna be fun. Good, excellent. Well, congrats to Eric as well. That's great news. So excellent. Now, let's talk a little bit more about your rich connectivity ecosystem. So it's something that 1623 is very proud of. And not only do you have newly added data center capacity where others have none available. So that's really important. So let's talk about that a little bit. It really is. It's been a five year journey to upgrade the building. And in late 2023, we set our last three generators and commissioned those in January. So we added three megawatts of redundant power to the facility. And at this show, as well as in the industry trades, we're hearing that capacity is below 5% across the United States. So as people are trying to solve solutions for the middle of the country, whether that be content, whether that be latency, we have capacity at 1623 Omaha and we're really proud of it. Absolutely, such an important location for you guys there in the Midwest. So that's excellent. Absolutely. And now your onsite internet exchange has also seen a five times increase in traffic. So we'd love to hear a little bit more about that as well. Yeah, it's great. I'm just amazed in the last 12 months what we've seen the evolution of peering and whether it be the broadband providers trying to get content closer to their eyeball or their customers. And whether it be content providers trying to get their content closer to those eyeball networks. And so really a coming together of peering explosion that we're seeing at an interconnection facility. And we've seen over a five fold increase in traffic year over year. And I really think as we sit here next year, we'll see another five fold increase in peering traffic at the end. Yeah, wow. Well, we can't wait to talk to you about that when it happens. That's right. And congratulations on the internet exchange traffic. So that's fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for joining us, Bill. Is there anything else you wanted to add? No, this has been a great show and I appreciate JSA doing, you know, JSA Live. And I hear there's over 2,000 attendees here and really a great place to come and connect. Absolutely, we were just saying that's so fun to connect with everybody here. So thanks for joining us on JSA TV. Thank you. And to all of our viewers, happy networking. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom Live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Tina, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms, straight from the pages of a telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, executive vice president at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scatochettia, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you. Thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out. And all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that K&N rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow. I know. I couldn't make it this year. But fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the Movers and Shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your Movers and Shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SaaS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Envolta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also Big Juan announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Envolta, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Envolta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. And swoosh, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services, and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie bar to set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country. And they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lombot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lombot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet, no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. That's the snack room, let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma city, Tonnequince Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one. Good one. All right, how can I follow up? I don't know. LinkSnova recently marked their 10 year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Deser, Peering Service. Now all Peering partners at LinkSnova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, LinkSnova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers and energy is a big thing right now. Lagrange Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month. And it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once and I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Our friends over at 1623 Farnum, by the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generators at their Omaha facility adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 Farnum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm making sure everything's got enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right, excellent. Now, Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay, here we go. Legrand's made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE Systems, a California-based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE Systems is advantageous for Legrand as ZPE Service Delivery for Edge Environments will complement Legrand's line of cabinets, PDU switches and fiber. Interesting. Also two of the biggest names in digital infrastructure announced a new deal this past month, guys. Get ready, American Tower and IBM teaming up, y'all. American Tower set to include IBM hybrid cloud platform to all of its access, Edge data center ecosystem. Big news, guys. It's also leveraging 5G and AI at the edge. AI at the edge, Jamie. I think we're gonna need to get used to hearing about AI this year. What do you think? I'm thinking that's like the topic of 2024. I agree. Yes, plus, yeah, our new future. DartPoints recently announcing their new partnership with Virtuous AI. The company makes custom AI models, which DartPoints plans to use for tackling challenges in data delivery, storage and processing. Talk about a smart move. Sounds like a smart move, Jay, but more big partnership news coming from in the form of ConnectBased joining, we love ConnectBased, by the way. ConnectBased joining forces with Carbon Technologies. That's Q-A-R-B-O-N Technologies. The new alliance will combine ConnectBased's customer network with Carbon's lattice SAS orchestration software. This is hot on the heels of their previous acquisition of Master Stream, a pricing and quoting platform for telecom companies. ConnectBased cannot stay out of the news right now. No, no, awesome. All right, let's go ahead and check in. On the New York Hudson Valley area, right, where Archtop Fiber has been busy bridging the digital divide. You know, we love these stories. They've acquired three regional carriers there in the last five months, including most recently, Warwick Valley Telephone. Congratulations, guys. This new addition will be rebranded as WVT Fiber and Archtop has already begun to deploy the fiber needed to deliver high-speed internet access to their newly acquired end users. It's a great story all around. Yeah, Archtop is no joke. They are getting it done out there in the Hudson Valley. So congrats to them. Over here in the Midwest, LightEdge started the year by expanding into Minneapolis. They acquired 76,000 square feet of 3.6 megawatt data center space to mark their 12th facility and their first in Minnesota. That's one way to ring in the new year. Congrats to our friends over there at LightEdge. Meanwhile, by the way, Ben with IG leaving their heart in San Francisco on purpose with their new expanded network into the Bay Area. This month, they announced a new project that will install the first Marine cable in the San Francisco Bay in over 20 years, two decades, guys. So that's really cool. Wow, true story, Jay. My grandfather used to play. I left my heart in San Francisco on the organ they had in their family room when I was a kid. Oh, it was a bat. Yeah, no, it was, I miss my grandfather. But anyway, back to this. Powerhouse data centers stayed true to their name this month by announcing not one, but two new expansion projects. The first one is right in data center alley with a new site in Northern Virginia called Powerhouse 95. The second big expansion is their first one outside of Virginia. This one is called Powerhouse Reno. It's located in Nevada, in case you didn't pick up on that one. Reno, yeah. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skadokataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out. And all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record-breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what we're doing. We did. Everyone had that glow. No, no, I couldn't make it this year. But fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a longtime SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation and here we go. Oh wait, that was you, sorry. That's okay, that's okay. And swish, collaboration and innovation, here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places but of course now Vancouver another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? Over here. That's the snack room, let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Tonnequin's EdgeX data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands including AI workloads. When all is said and done they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center and we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one, all right. How can I follow up? I don't know, all right. Link Nova recently marked their 10 year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Deserve Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Link Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Link Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers and energy is a big thing right now. Legrand's Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month and it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once and I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Friends over at 1623 front. And by the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generation three new generators at their Omaha facility adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 Farnum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm making sure everything's good enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right. Excellent. Now Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay. Here we go. Legrans made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE systems a California based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE systems is advantageous for, advantageous for Legrans as ZPE service delivery for edge environments will compliment Legrans line of cabinets, PDU switches and fiber. Interesting. Also two of the biggest names in digital infrastructure announced a new deal this past month. Guys, get ready. American Tower and IBM teaming up, y'all. American Tower set to include IBM hybrid cloud platform to all of its access edge data center ecosystem. Big news guys. It's also leveraging 5G and AI at the edge. AI at the edge. Jamie, I think we're gonna need to get used to hearing about AI this year. What do you think? I'm thinking that's like the topic of 2024. I agree. Plus, plus, plus. Yeah. Our new future. Dot points, recently announcing their new partnership with Virtuous AI. The company makes custom AI models, which dot points plans to use for tackling challenges in data delivery, storage and processing. Talk about a smart move. Sounds like a smart move, Jay, but more big partnership news coming from in the form of connect-based joining. We love connect-based. By the way, connect-based joining forces with carbon technologies. That's QAR, B-O-N technologies. The new alliance will combine connect-based's customer network with carbon's lattice SAS orchestration software. This is hot on the heels of their previous acquisition of Master Stream, a pricing and quoting platform for telecom companies. Connect-based cannot stay out of the news right now. No, no. Awesome. All right, let's go ahead and check in on the New York Hudson Valley area, right? Where Archtop Fiber has been busy bridging the digital divide. You know, we love these stories. They've acquired three regional carriers there in the last five months, including most recently Warwick Valley Telephone. Congratulations, guys. This new addition will be rebranded as WVT Fiber and Archtop has already begun to deploy the fiber needed to deliver high-speed internet access to their newly acquired end users. It's a great story all around. Yeah, Archtop has no joke. They are getting it done out there in the Hudson Valley. So congrats to them. Over here in the Midwest, LightEdge started the year by expanding into Minneapolis. They acquired 76,000 square feet of 3.6 megawatt data center space to mark their 12th facility and their first in Minnesota. That's one way to ring in the new year. Congrats to our friends over there at LightEdge. Meanwhile, by the way, been with IG leaving their heart in San Francisco. On purpose with their new expanded network into the Bay Area this month, they announced a new project that will install the first Marine cable in the San Francisco Bay in over 20 years, two decades, guys. So that's really cool. Wow, true story, Jay. My grandfather used to play. I left my heart in San Francisco on the organ they had in their family room when I was a kid. Oh, my God. That's so weird. Oh, I love that. Yeah, no, I miss my grandfather. But anyway, back to this. Powerhouse data centers stayed true to their name this month by announcing not one, but two new expansion projects. The first one is right in data center alley with a new site in Northern Virginia called Powerhouse 95. The second big expansion is their first one outside of Virginia. This one is called Powerhouse Reno. It's located in Nevada in case you didn't pick up on that one. Reno, yeah. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skadokataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record-breaking attendance and I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. It sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what they did. Everyone had that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. But it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the Movers and Shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your Movers and Shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SPP of software solutions. Jim is a long time SaaS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Invota, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Invota, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Invota, definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation and here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. And swoosh, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here to the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big, high bar just that. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana LED who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country and they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek, both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lombot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lombot as it's highly adaptive and fine tuned for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology. It's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center recently announced a brand new meet me room called MMR5. It's part of a large effort to renovate the building into a cutting edge connectivity hub. Unfortunately yet no word on whether there will be great snacks in the room at this time. We will get back to you with that very important data. Because who doesn't love snacks, am I right? That's the snack room. Let's get the word out here. Over in Oklahoma City, Tonnequin's Edge X data center is undergoing some new upgrades. They're preparing the facility for new demands, including AI workloads. When all is said and done, they're hoping to add up to 12 megawatts more power to their data center. And we say all the power to you. Oh, that's a good one. All right. How can I follow up? I don't know. All right, Lynx Nova recently marked their 10 year anniversary as Northern Virginia's only multi-site IXP to celebrate the added a brand new capability guys. Here we are, Microsoft Desire Peering Service. Now all peering partners at Lynx Nova can access network solutions specifically designed for tools like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. Happy birthday, Lynx Nova. Happy birthday indeed. And there is a new kind of energy meter in town for data centers. And energy is a big thing right now. LaGron's Starline brand unveiled the M70 critical power monitor this month. And it's set to be the new standard for data center busway power monitoring around the globe. The M70 can measure up to six current transformers at once. And I'm not talking about Optimus Prime. Friends over a 1623 phronum. By the way, I don't use that word lightly. Really awesome people there. They are powering up. They recently deployed three new generators at their Omaha facility adding three megawatts of power. This was the first bit of news out of 1623 phronum since naming Bill Severin as president and CEO. Congrats, Bill. We see you. Congratulations, Bill. Bill has been in leadership there since 2019 as an operating partner. So he's now at the helm, making sure everything's got enough juice. He's juicing it up. So that's the last of our collaboration and innovation news for the month. All right, excellent. Now, Dean, let's talk deals and big wins. Okay, guys, welcome to deals and big wins. This section of our program is all about mergers, acquisitions, expansions, and projects. Go ahead, Dino. I would love to. Okay, here we go. Legrans made a big move with their acquisition of ZPE Systems, a California-based IT services company specializing in remote management of network IT equipment. Adding ZPE Systems is advantageous for Legrans as ZPE service delivery for edge environments will complement Legrans line of cabinets, PDU switches, and fiber. Interesting. Also, two of the biggest names in digital infrastructure announced a new deal this past month, guys. Get ready, American Tower and IBM teaming up, y'all. American Tower, set to include IBM hybrid cloud platform to all of its access edge data center ecosystem. Big news, guys. This is also leveraging 5G and AI at the edge. AI at the edge. Jamie, I think we're gonna need to get used to hearing about AI this year. What do you think? I'm thinking that's like the topic of 2024. I agree. Yes, plus, plus. Yeah, our new future. DartPoints recently announcing their new partnership with Virtuous AI. The company makes custom AI models, which DartPoints plans to use for tackling challenges in data delivery, storage, and processing. Talk about a smart move. Sounds like a smart move, Jay. But more big partnership news coming from in the form of ConnectBased joining, we love ConnectBased, by the way. ConnectBased joining forces with Carbon Technologies. That's Q-A-R-B-O-N Technologies. The new alliance will combine ConnectBased's customer network with Carbon's LATIS SAS orchestration software. This is hot on the heels of their previous acquisition of Master Stream, a pricing and quoting platform for telecom companies. ConnectBased cannot stay out of the news right now. No, no. Awesome. All right, let's go ahead and check in on the New York Hudson Valley area, right? Where Archtop Fiber has been busy bridging the digital divide. You know, we love these stories. They've acquired three regional carriers there in the last five months, including most recently, Warwick Valley Telephone. Congratulations, guys. This new addition will be rebranded as WVT Fiber and Archtop has already begun to deploy the fiber needed to deliver high-speed internet access to their newly acquired end users. It's a great story all around. Yeah, Archtop is no joke. They are getting it done out there in the Hudson Valley. So congrats to them. Over here in the Midwest, Light Edge started the year by expanding into Minneapolis. They acquired 76,000 square feet of 3.6 megawatt data center space to mark their 12th facility and their first in Minnesota. That's one way to ring in the new year. Congrats to our friends over there at Light Edge. Meanwhile, bye. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. I'm Allison Whelan coming to you live from Metro Connect USA 2024. And joining me is Hal Baylor from INOC. Hal, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. Of course. So for those who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about INOC? Sure. INOC has been providing outsourced knock services for the last 24 years, which is quite a while. That is a long time. In this industry very specifically. So we have extensive experience in the fiber market. We also work with data centers and content providers as well. So that's been our legacy and we're continuing with that and advancing our services and capabilities. Yeah, we were just saying in that 24 years, you had the opportunity to kind of perfect the operation side of things, which is key to moving forward. Absolutely. Gathering best practices from lots of different companies and learning to make those very standardized and high quality of service. And your team had a big announcement yesterday. I hear it might involve AI. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I can. AI has been bantered about by a lot of companies. A lot of people are getting into it, doing lots of different things with it. We've actually been working with AI for over three and a half years developing our operations platform around it. So we have an AI driven operations platform and the announcement was it's in the third iteration of that platform. So that platform makes automation really work for operations, which is not something a lot of people talk about, but what it does is it automates the alarms that happen on a network and it creates a ticket automatically by doing a lot of correlation in the back end. So you get faster, mean time to ticket or a time to ticket. And you also get faster mean time to repair because the analysis of what's broken doesn't have to be done by an engineer. It actually shows up in the ticket, which is really cool. Yeah, and so that's from the operation side. What about customers? How is this benefiting your customers? Well, so with that platform, we're going in and replacing a lot of human function, which is very prone to errors and automating that. So that's really great. It also can communicate with customers of our fiber providers or data center providers. It can communicate with them instantly. So people know exactly what's going on before they even realize that there's a problem. Rather than in the old days, we'd be looking at a screen hoping to catch an alarm and then the customer's calling in, the end customer is calling in and saying, hey, we have a problem. And then we go look at things. Now it's they know and we know within 30 seconds. Yeah, very rapid. Fabulous. It is. And so we're really achieving things like auto resolution rate. That's another thing that we can do. We can actually do auto resolution for like a priority three and four tickets. They get resolved without human intervention. We're seeing, we have one OEM that we work for that provides services to lots of different companies. And we're seeing a 26% time to ticket increase in time to ticket, which is fabulous because again, we go from that manual correlation and understanding of what's going on to the automation side. We're also seeing at another large OEM for their customers a 50% time to resolution improvement. And there are other statistics like that that it's just speeding things up and making things simpler and very precise. Again, lots of our problems in the past were from human error and we're getting around that by having everything show up in the ticket very accurately. We know exactly what to do and how to resolve the issue. That's great. Those are some very impressive stats. So I'm sure our viewers will want to learn more. Can you share how to get in touch with you or how to get in touch with the Inok team? Sure, go to my LinkedIn profile or to my email address which is hbaler.inok.com and have a LinkedIn address and also our website is inok.com. Pretty simple, kind of like iPhone. Inok, inok.com. All right, Hal, well, thank you so much for joining me. It was great getting to chat with you and learn a little bit more about Inok. And thank you to our viewers for tuning in. Until next time, happy networking. Thank you, Alison, appreciate it. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey, Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me, as always, is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scato-Katya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out. And all here is it was a huge, huge success with record-breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. The courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too, I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SVP of software solutions. Jim is a long time SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta, including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachievers of 2024 already. And it's only number one. All right, so the next up is collaboration and innovation. And here we go. Oh, wait, that was you. Sorry. That's okay. That's okay. And swish, collaboration and innovation. Here we go. And now we're here into the collaboration and innovation segment where we break down new partnerships, new products, new services and new sustainability initiatives. So Jamie, take it away. Ooh, big, big pie barter set. Okay, let's go. We start off with Lantana, LED, who supplies lightning for data halls all over the country. And they recently unveiled two new product lines designed to meet the very demanding needs of data centers. The first one called Ellucent and the second one, Neoterek. Both specifically designed with data centers in mind. And speaking of cool products, there's a new AI service being used by SaskTel, the primary telecom provider for all of Saskatchewan in Canada. It's a virtual agent for mobile customers called Lumbot created by software company Aleppo. Aleppo is very proud of Lumbot as it's highly adaptive and fine tune for understanding language. Jamie, we are truly living in the future and I am truly thrilled that I got through that announcement with all of those words. We really are and our clients are right there on the bleeding edge of this technology, it's incredible. So with that, let's go ahead and switch gears to some facility construction news right now. It's a city filled with great places, but of course now Vancouver, another great spot to see the Spencer building at the city's Harbor Center. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. I'm Allison Whelan coming to you live from Metro Connect USA 2024 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and joining me today is Rod Hansen and Jonathan Restivo, co-founders at Cityside Fiber. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Allison, appreciate it. Of course, so Jonathan, you presented on a panel this morning. So for those who can't make it, can you tell us a little bit about that panel and some key takeaways? Yeah, absolutely. It was a really interesting conversation with some other industry leaders from other areas throughout the US, a little bit further along in some of their developments. So it's interesting to hear some of their stories about some of the challenges that they're having compared to us who is relatively new to the space and where the industry is going in particular around Fiber to the home and Fiber to the Prem out in those communities. I think kind of the consensus is that there's a shift right now from a bit of a Wild West, everyone trying to figure out who's going where and who the developers were going to be into more settling into some established companies and now it goes from staking your claim or anything like that to now being able to execute and optimize through some of your efficiencies. So one of the points that I really tried to hit on and that is a focus for us at CitySide is as we look at some of those, how to operate within that environment, the keys for us are going to be taking advantage and leveraging our operational efficiencies being local to Orange County, having that presence is a good OPEX driver there, marketing and brand efficiencies. So being able to speak to the community and hit more people at once as opposed to being spread out across different franchises. And at the end of the day, the focus on the customer experience, that's our driver as a differentiator within the market from the cable companies, from the legacy providers. And so I think across the board, what you're seeing for us and other industry developers is a focus on that and making sure that we're getting that right and it's hard. I think that was a big part of that conversation. Sounds like the overall theme were efficiency. We're driving towards efficiency and off assets. Performance, executing on all these business models that we've had out there and we've talked about and looking at the numbers, but at the end of the day, you have to hit those numbers. And so that'll be a big focus for us and the industry on the whole to see who can perform the way that we said we could. I think it's really become now a, you can prove it, right? You know, the people have been funded, we're out, we're building, we're doing all those things and it's gone from show me you can build to tell me how many passings you have and now it's okay, what's your penetration rate really gonna look like? And are these models gonna work? And so I think it's really comes down to execution. We feel very confident that we're on the right path. We've made the right decisions. We're seeing really great signs, but we're still really early. So it's really now a matter of, executing on what we said we were gonna do. We'll get updates on all those stats, I'm sure in the Metro Connects feature, correct? Yes, yes, exactly. Well, we talked to you and Honolulu, we got to catch up there and you guys had talked about Tested and Datapoint. Do we have any updates there? Go ahead. No, we continue to develop more neighborhoods and bring more neighborhoods online and bring more customers within those neighborhoods online, which is exciting. Going through the expected growing pains, how to get up to our full operating speed as we talked about. So that's all part of expected challenges. Some on the build side as well. Someone asked if there was a surprise, if building in California was a surprise and the response is no, we knew that it was gonna be slow, we knew that it was gonna be challenging and things like that. So we're just, we're powering through. We learn from our growing pains, right? Yeah, absolutely. And more cities in the works throughout Orange County, as we've talked about and been steadfast in, our focus is on finding underserved people throughout Orange County and communities and being able to bring fiber to those communities. And so our target for 2024 is to be out there in about 10 cities by the end of this year. And so we're on track and moving forward with that. Very exciting growth, growth, growth. Yeah, I think one of the things that we've seen is the city, it's not just us going through a learning curve but the cities are going through a learning curve as well. It's been 50 years since somebody's gone into a city and built at the scale we're building. And so pretty much city staff hasn't had, hasn't really gone through this before. So they're learning with us. And the good news is I think the city of Tessin is a great example where we started slower but as the city gets more comfortable with what we're doing, permits are starting to flow faster. They're starting to be more comfortable how they support us in the field to make sure that they've got the right inspectors and that they know what to look for. So it's really, I think a real positive sign for us as we get into same things now happening with Dana Point. So that's a good sign and as we get into new cities, I think we'll continue to learn along with the city on how to work together and hopefully start to accelerate that build. Yeah, just getting in the groove of things, right? Yep, yep, exactly. And you touched on a minute ago, the customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit more about the customer experience that you guys are providing and the great work that you're doing in those communities through that? Yeah, I think Jonathan's team actually is focused in that area. He pretty much owns that part of the business, but I think we are completely aligned that that is in our opinion the single biggest thing that we have to keep our eye on and focus on. And Jonathan, you can speak to it. Yeah, it's just adding a level of communication and engagement that I think is lacking from some of the legacy providers. Being able to have direct communications with folks that are higher level even in the company, right? We had someone show up in our office, I don't know if you told that story last time, but someone showed up in our office and had some questions or whatever and Rod was the one that dealt with them and kind of walked them through a couple of things and he left happy, right? When's the last time you were able to have access to the Cox CEO in that level of engagement? So yeah, for us it's being local, putting ourselves out there in the community in a number of different ways, exposing ourselves to that feedback and interaction is really what drives that. And then we're also working on some cool things actually with JSA to continue to enhance that customer experience and provide additional benefits that go beyond just a higher quality internet service and internet experience. And so we're excited to bring those on over the next couple quarters. Yeah, well, it sounds like you guys have so much to look forward to for the rest of 2024 and beyond. So for our viewers who wanna go to learn more, where can they go to connect with you guys or to reach out to you? Yeah, citysidefiber.com, if you're in the market, go ahead and sign up. But yeah, industry-wide where we have pretty active presence on our socials and LinkedIn in particular. So yeah, we're always available. All right, give them a follow on LinkedIn. Thank you guys for joining me. That was great catching up. And thank you to our viewers for tuning in. Until next time, happy networking. Thank you, Alison. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey, Dino. We are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely, my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Skadokataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out and all here is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance and I especially wish I could have joined that K&N rooftop party. It sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sunkissed. I was very jealous of that. That's what we're doing. We did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. No, no, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education, which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes, let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. The courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news, but it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking along with partner OpenZR Plus. Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mellor as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going over there at T5 and good people too. I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. My name is Emily Scherer for JSA and I am joined today by Brett Lindsay. He is the CEO of Involta. They are a data center leader reimagining the future of enterprise data centers. Brett, thank you so much for being here today. Glad to be here, thanks for having me. Absolutely, and you are the new CEO of Involta. So a fairly recent position for you and you come to the data center industry after many years in fiber. So I'm interested in what brought you over to the data center space and what opportunities you see for Involta. Well, after being in the fiber space for 30 years, I thought it was time to do something new. And it's really exciting to me to be in the data center space when you consider everything that's happening in the sector. The tailwinds behind it have probably never been stronger than they are today. And so really thought it was a great time to jump into a different sector of the space that I'm very familiar with. I've known Involta for more than a decade. We've sold services with them and I've known the original founder Bruce for a long time. So it was a very nice and natural fit for me. Great, excellent. Well, congratulations on your new position. Very exciting. Now let's talk a little bit about growth and expansion across the United States. So what markets do you see becoming more attractive to enterprises in the year ahead and why might that be? Yeah, I think that almost every market is attractive right now to the enterprise. And so when we think about it, we like to be in tier two markets that are maybe a little bit less competitive than Atlanta and New York and LA. And so by going after those tier two cities, we still have a large population trying to find a city that's roughly a million people. That gives us enough kind of mid-market and large enterprise that we can successfully fill our data centers. And so for us right now, I think it's also about solving that problem at the edge. And so I think we've heard about the edge for probably a decade. I think it's finally coming to fruition. And so from our perspective, our ability to service customers at that 500 kilowatt to five megawatt is really our sweet spot. And so our belief is that by continuing to go after that space, we can grow and continue to expand into new markets. Absolutely, excellent. Well, good luck with that. That sounds fantastic. And I knew you participated on a panel yesterday. It was about the title of that was what will it take to deliver the data center of the future today? So tell us how are data centers keeping pace while maintaining an eye on the future as well? I don't think that you can operate a data center today without having an eye on the future because the demands of the data centers are growing so quickly. All of us have to be planning, especially because of what's happening in supply chain where you really need to know where your business is going to be going 12, 24, 36 months into the future. So from our perspective, being able to tell enterprise customers that we are AI ready, not that we're going to be building the large language model for them, but we're there to support them to provide them a secure location where they can stand up their own AI infrastructure with a partner like us is something that we think will really be kind of carrying the business forward for the next five to 10 years. Absolutely. And everybody wanting to get a jump on AI, so having a partner that can help them do that is very key. Absolutely. Great. Well, is there anything else you want to add? Maybe tell us where we can learn more about in Volta. Sure. Well, a couple of things. We just rolled out a new partner channel and so we're excited about that. So we have Michael Jofi who's the VP over that group and he's really getting us out into the marketplace in a way that we hadn't been before. We also just recently did an acquisition in Green Bay. So this is a new site for us with a campus that will allow for us to expand up to 20 megawatts. It could be our largest data center. So for us right now, I think just we're here at the show. We'd love to have conversations with people, but excited to see what's coming for us in the future. Yeah, congratulations about Green Bay. That's really exciting. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today and joining us on JSA TV. Yeah, my pleasure. Appreciate it. Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in and to our viewers, happy networking. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it. Hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecoms straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scato-Cataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you. Thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha? That's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right? Dean, we sent them out and all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that Canon rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know. Do you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sun-kissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcasters. I got to watch all of those. They were awesome. So make sure that you check out the JSA TV YouTube channel for tons of interviews from PTC. We managed to catch lots of great moments and insights that you don't want to miss out on. And you know what? For me, one of those big pieces of news coming out of PTC was the announcement of PTC's new partnership with Columbia Business School Executive Education. Which they got together to develop the new top talent leadership development program. So really exciting, very cool there. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very, very cool. And it kicks off next year in Hawaii with 30 executive participants. And I can't wait to see how that goes. Well, we better get to the news before you change back. So ready to jump in with the first segment of today's show, my friend? Yes. Let's get into it with the movers and shakers from the past month. Courtesy of JSA's Fast Forward. Here is your movers and shakers news. From new hires to award wins and events and publishing news. But it is mostly hiring announcements this time around. So let's kick it off with publishing first. Light River announced a new study that's all about interoperable networking. Along with partner OpenZR Plus, Light River tested optical transceiver modules with a number of vendors to prove that they can easily integrate with existing infrastructure. Very, very important. So check out their new white paper to learn more about that. Well done, well done, Dean. Okay, our next mover and shaker is T5 data centers. We love those guys. They made a leadership change by adding David Mettler as their new EVP of sales and marketing. So congratulations, David. He comes with plenty of experience in both sales and data network and network engineering. So great fit for T5. Yeah, lots of stuff going on over there at T5 and good people too. I love them. There are other new VP appointments around the industry as well with Jim Brinkzma joining Light River as their SPP of software solutions. Jim is a long time SAS expert. You could say he was sassy. He's been sassy for a while. So Light River is betting on him to lead them into continuing to innovate in the optical networking space. And we can't leave out Involta, our friends there. They also did some great hiring. They announced Gabriel Urru as their senior director of product and also big one announcing Bret Lindsay as CEO. Congratulations. Yeah, and we should say that this move coincides with some other big announcements from Involta including an expansion into Green Bay and the launch of their new secure power co-location offering. So lots happening over at Involta. Definitely one to watch. Yeah, they are like the overachiever. Welcome to JSA TV, where we're covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, digital infrastructure and the networks within. My name is Emily Sherer for JSA and I am joined today by Jeff Greenberg. He is the CMO of Dart Points. Jeff, it's great to have you here. Thanks Emily, I'm excited to be here. Absolutely, good to see you here. And so Dart Points is well known in the data center ecosystem. A lot of people know who you are but for those watching who might not know as much, can you share a little bit of background on the company? Yeah, absolutely. So Dart Points, as you mentioned, we operate data centers. We have 11 data centers in 10 markets in the Southeast, so in the Carolinas, in Louisiana, then in the Midwest, in Ohio and Indiana and we serve also Northern Kentucky area. So in addition to providing your co-location space and power, we also offer cloud services, cyber security, backup, disaster recovery, things like that. Excellent, and a good footprint there that you guys have. Yeah, it's nice. We have some really nice markets that are growing both economically and as far as population, the Carolinas are a great hot market right now. A lot of people moving there, a lot of good economic activity going on there as well. Excellent, great. And I know that 2023 was a phenomenal year for Dart Points and I would love to just hear about some of the successes that you've seen, some of the partnerships, some of the new locations maybe. Yeah, that's a great segue. So one of the most exciting things that happened with us in 23 was that we completed an acquisition of Venue. Venue was owned by a company called Rev. We completed that in May, then figure three months or so of integration and everything operationally as well as from a brand perspective. So that was completed in the third quarter. That was a pretty heavy lift, but we did a wonderful job with it, incorporated obviously the business and 40 or so employees. So it was really a great experience for us hopefully for our customers and the employees as well, so that went really smoothly. And a couple of big things. We did a big upgrade in our Greenville, South Carolina office from an operational perspective and then we recently just completed, started it in 23, just completed it in early 24, a refresh for our Cincinnati office. So really just a complete base lift. It's a fabulous looking facility right now. Excellent, a lot of excitement, a lot of things going on. Yeah, sounds like it's all gone smoothly and Greenville is beautiful. We were talking about this earlier, but a great town too. You get a chance to visit Greenville, South Carolina. It is absolutely wonderful. Yeah, absolutely. Good, good, well great. Now, as DoorPoints continues to expand its footprint and solidify its position as a leader in the data center sector, what are some of the strategies or initiatives that you have in place to sustain and accelerate this growth well into 2024? Yeah, so I mean, I think we focus on three areas for growth. So one would be organic growth. So continuing to grow in the markets where we currently operate, continuing to get our brand out there and drive acquisition that way. Of course, maintain the customers we have in the most markets. Secondly, I would say we look for M&A opportunities. We're pretty opportunistic from that standpoint. So any opportunities that we can find that are a good fit for us and ideally maybe somewhat tangential to where we currently operate, obviously that's a big part of growth. And the last thing I would say is a little bit more on the operational side. We're looking to, I'll call it, densify some of our data centers to prepare for the expected growth in AI and other larger workloads that are coming down the next few years. Of course, yeah, absolutely. That'll require a pretty big investment on our part. Yep, and this is a great place to be at for M&A, like you said, so good. So yeah, good, good. Well, it's been great to talk to you, Jeff. Is there anything else you wanna chat about? No, I think that's it, it was great. Great, well, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. And to all of our viewers, thanks for tuning in. We will see you next time. Thanks for joining us as we broadcast from the JSA TV newsroom live to LinkedIn and YouTube. You got it, hey, Dino, we are here to bring you all the latest and greatest from the world of data centers and telecom, straight from the pages of telecom news blog, which is what you can get to if you scan over my shoulder. That's correct. I'm Dean Perrine, executive vice president at JSA and joining me as always is the lovely, my friend, my mentor, my boss, Jamie Scato-Cataya, founder and CEO of JSA. Thank you, thank you. And yes, hello out there. Or should I say Aloha, that's for all of you guys recently returning home from PTC in Honolulu. I know you're missing the Aloha love. Well, I wasn't there this year, sadly, but our top brass, right, Dean, we sent them out. And all I hear is it was a huge, huge success with record breaking attendance. And I especially wish I could have joined that K&N rooftop party. Sounded like a total blast. Beautiful pictures from there. It did sound like a blast. And Jamie, I don't know, did you see all the pictures from that? Everyone looked a little sun-kissed. I was very jealous of that. That's for sure. They did. Everyone had that glow, that glow. I know, I couldn't make it this year, but fortunately, JSA still had it covered with our crack events team and JSA TV broadcast.