 Welcome to JSA TV Europe and our live today event on 2023 predictions. I'm Jean-Marc Lehman. Joining me today is Michael Cantor, CIO of Park Place Technologies. Michael, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a tremendous busy year in the data center optimization sustainability space, especially the sustainability conversation has changed so much this year. I want to pick your brains and I want you to tell me what have been the biggest events around data sustainability and optimization that you have witnessed this year? Yeah, for sure. We are tracking this ourselves. We're a very sustainable company as it is, you know, enabling companies to reuse hardware over time, so used hardware and those sorts of things to make sure we're operating in a sustainable space. But we're watching the markets carefully. And if you take a look at, you know, sort of the Eurozone sorts of regulations that are coming out, there's a continuing demand for build restriction in the Eurozone, right? You know, people trying to suppress or regulate the emissions from data centers. Certainly the power consumption is a concern, you know, in relation to power grid and the rising cost of power. And then you look at even, you know, some places considering moratoriums and data center builds in very hot spots, right? So Ireland's a very popular space. And we see the potential force of some similar moratoriums as we saw in Singapore in Ireland. So those are all very concerning. We're doing our best to make sure we're positioned to help our customers through any of those concerns. But that sustainability itself is a big one. If you look globally, you know, costs are rising. So I mentioned the cost of power. So everybody's having to deal with that. Cost of living is increasing. So all of those basic goods are having an impact. And then the last thing I'd say is supply chain, you know, it's difficult to construct data centers and to get equipment into data centers with supply chain restrictions the way they are. There's definitely a bit of uncertainty and challenges going on as we move into a new year. So when you look into the new year into 2023, what do you expect will happen next year, data center, European data center wise? Yeah, why? There's no question those trends are not going to stop. And so I think there will continue to be a drive towards regulation of consumption and emissions within the EU and really globally. I mean, we're going to see the same things in the US. Probably not too many places that won't be affected by that as everybody joins the Accords and tries to drive sustainability. And then you look into what people are doing contractually to try to help enforce that sense towards sustainability. I think those things will continue. I would love to see the supply chain, you know, get better. It doesn't feel like it is myself when I'm trying to order new equipment, even laptops, you know, we have a hard time getting the particular builds of laptops you want and are having to vary our purchases quite a bit just to find what's in stock. So I would like that to change. You know, what's driving it's kind of probably one of those longer macro trends. That's not easy to change tomorrow. So I don't have a lot of hope there. You know, we have a subsidiary called curvature that sells some refurbished equipment and and I'm using that equipment myself because I get brand new equipment from anybody. So I think I think that will have continue to happen. The other thing that probably not directed the sustainability but certainly impacts data centers is kind of staffing. You know, the whole the whole staffing equation does seem to be changing, you know, a bit. We struggled at the beginning a lot of this year and probably into August of September in terms of finding the right talent, whether it was time talent or or contracting talent. We struggled to get that talent. We're starting to see that turn a little bit is to think people worry about a recession and start going, hey, I better settle down. That was not the time to switch jobs. That seems to be helping us. But that's a trend that I would say will ideally and seems to be improving as we go into 2023. Okay, that's interesting. You brought up a lot of different issues, especially with supply chain, which is something which is not unique to this sector as well. I think it's important to say that it's every other sector has the same issue. Right. But are you optimistic that maybe by 24, somehow do you expect around 24 early 25 that the supply chain will be stabilized across the market economic level? Yeah, I think it depends on what the core problem is and I think it differs from company to company. You know, certainly here in the US, there are new fabs being built to supply more chips, you know, locally. So I think that's going to help, for example, kind of Cisco, you know, where, where Cisco has been having trouble with supply chain. Hopefully it helps everybody else out. But I do see massive investments being driven by local governments, whether it's in the US, the other places, people are recognizing, hey, I need to stimulate that that manufacturing capacity so that we don't run into this again. So I do think later 2024, 2025 as those fabs come online, that would be a big impact from that. Okay, there's some light at the end of the tunnel. You mentioned some struggle to find the right talent this year, but maybe going above the struggle to find it, because we can talk about the struggles of next year. So how has 2022 treated workplace technologies? Like how have you grown this year? How have you expanded? Where have you expanded as well? Yeah, we've done remarkably well with those challenges, right? And so, you know, we continue to acquire companies. And so that's been our history. We're trying to build a strong TPM business. We've continued to acquire in that space to make sure we've got the right coverage, the right parts, the right ability, you know, in all parts of the globe. So we've gone through a number of acquisitions in 2022 that we'll continue to do. But we've also built some ancillary businesses to TPM. So if you look at our professional services we bought, we just announced the purchase of Centrix IT, doubles our professional services capability and capacity. A fantastic buy for us. We've been investing in software companies. And so earlier in the year, store first and getting ourselves into disk storage management and migration. Those are capabilities that our customers have asked for that we responded to by bringing them what they asked for. So that's been huge for us in 2022. We continue to invest heavily in our ability to bring new part products into the TPM. And so think about TPM, we constantly have to be ready for the next generation of products to come off of warranty. So it's a big investment, you know, to get ourselves familiar with that equipment, know how to operate it. And so every time one of those comes out, we spend a lot of money to make sure we're the best at supporting that equipment. So that's part of 2022. And then the last thing I'd say is we continue to grow our footprint. So we open a big new facility in Cork where we're doing support center operations to make sure we've got great time zone coverage. We're expanding sales in Sao Paulo to make sure we've got good coverage on that time. We're working on a new office in Tokyo to further increase our capacity there. We continue to invest in those areas that we see the opportunity. Okay, very interesting. Well, expanding all over the world. I was going to, I think you've already kind of answered parts of my next question because I was going to ask about expansion next year. I'm sure an acquisition will be in line somewhere. I don't know how much you can talk about that. Sorry, go ahead. No, and then I was going to add in terms of staff expansion, like so from the struggles they had this year finding the right talents, did you change any framework, internal frameworks, internal, how things work internally to go and find new recruits next year? Yeah, well, the pandemic has assisted us, right? So we were a very office-oriented culture before. We obviously had to adjust just as many other companies have to work from home and that has expanded our ability to get staffing from anywhere. So I would say for my team, you know, one, we kind of wanted that geographic expansion anyways because we're a 24 by 7 business. And so it helps me to have engineers and APAC and then we make sure we've got that global coverage. And so we continue to use kind of the global markets to expand on our development teams. So same story. We're very focused in a couple of cities in the U.S. But we're starting to expand that further and going, hey, we figured out how to organize teams and make them work effectively remotely. So let's go ahead and recruit remotely. Yeah, okay. And then in terms of acquisitions, is there anything that you can lift the veil on or? Not really. We certainly have a lot of targets and a lot of it's based on, you know, our customer demand, right? A customer may come to us and say, hey, we have a gap in storage management. You know, can you fill that gap? And we figure out whether it's best to release a new product and build it ourselves. And so if you look at our Parkview side, a new product released this year with storage management. We built that ourselves. We have our own team supporting that. But in other cases, we have acquired companies where we wanted to build that faster than expected. My sustainable light was cut off, so I'm sorry about that. It's busting on a good message. And it doesn't last too long. It's 10 minutes. This is perfect. Save a lot of energy that way. There you go. We'll come to the conclusion anyway. So I was going to ask, if people want to learn more about Parkplace Technologies and getting touch, how can they do so? Yep, pretty easy. All the standard channels. And so ParkplaceTechnologies.com, you know, our website, we're on all the social media channels you'd expect us to be on. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Phone numbers are right there on the website. Lots of ways to contact us. And so pretty easy to find us. Okay. And then, Michael, last question. If you have to describe how you're feeling about next year in one words, what words will you choose? In one word, excited, I guess, I would say. So for us, we continue to expand like crazy. And so brings a lot of opportunities to my team to get into some new areas and do different things. And so we're all pretty hyped up about some of the investments we're making and our opportunity to participate in. It's definitely shaping up to be quite interesting year for everyone in this sector. Michael Contour, thank you so much for talking to me. And then ask our viewers at home as well. Thank you for tuning into JSATV Live. Don't forget to check our social channels for more content. And until next time, happy networking.