 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for data center and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of JSA here at virtual PTC 21 joining me today is Mr Eric contact he is the chairman of globe net and of course president of suboptic. Aloha Eric, happy new year. Jamie, thanks for having me. It's an honor as always. I know you're a returning guest, one of our favorites here at JSA TV. And today's a very big day. Before we get to your big news, I'd like you to tell our viewers just in case they don't know a little bit about suboptic. Absolutely Jamie and thanks again for having me here. Suboptic is the industry association for the global submarine cable system industry. And we are a trade association that is over 30 years old where we've been holding a triennial conference where we openly have shared ideas and technologies and directions of, let's say the subsea industry. About a year and a half ago or so we changed the format to truly establish suboptic as an independent trade association that represents the industry. We were founded on the belief that we should openly share ideas and address issues in a neutral forum representing the ecosystem of the global submarine communications industry. And our goal as a public is to be the voice of the industry, promoting innovation sustainability and and what it else is necessary to support the global communications fabric. So, we truly believe in openness transparency, being inclusive, independent, fostering diversity, and then building communities, and it's along these axes that we have actually worked in, let's say developing our most important pillars from an association perspective. So, we're looking at things as awareness, the critical importance of the submarine cable industry and that global communications fabric sustainability, and the fact that that the world needs to come together and one of the things that is critical for us as well is human capital, how are you going to develop a new human capital, how are you going to track the human capital to our industry, and something that we have similarly seen in in sister industries. The fact that it's been difficult for us to bring in new people to replace, let's say the aging population of experts. And for 20 plus years and one day I think we're going to retire maybe eventually, and who's there to replace us certainly the, the people capital top of mind and very important these days. You also have some very important breaking news on this virtual floor here at PTC. Can you tell us what's what's the major headline. Absolutely. Jamie. So let me take you back to suboptic 2019 in New Orleans. We had a series of roundtable discussions and we were talking exactly about the subject of human capital and how do we collaborate and how to make our industry more sustainable. And the idea basically of creating an organization that would allow us to focus mainly on, let's say education and research started to take root. And we are very, very proud to announce that the suboptic association launched on January 18 the suboptic foundation. It's a charitable organization that is being built to focus on education and and on research. And this is not something that is new for suboptic I mean throughout the years, we've always had master classes and other sorts of educational programs that are in conferences. And in 2019, we also supported the subsist summer school we had over 85 participants from around the world, which was then followed up by a meaning meet this last summer. And this year in 2021, we're going to have the next hopefully live suboptic summer school. But what makes the foundation different is that as a charitable organization that has legal entities in the United States and in the UK initially, is that we're going to be able to access a research grants endowments. So people can donate to the foundation companies can contribute or match their funds, so that we can actually develop these programs that are absolutely critical to our industry. So I'm very proud with the announcement of the suboptic foundation. So, and we are so honored about this is huge news we're so excited here at SA TV to break this news. So for the broader telecom industry, tell us the primary benefits of this foundation. Well, first and foremost, one of the things that that we have seen around the educational side is that we didn't really have, let's say a curriculum and a program established for the subsea industry. So by supporting the summer school in partnership with Google and the optical society of American Foundation. We've created now really a structure for having masters level and PhD level people look at the new technologies understand the industry and try to make it attractive, let's say to to those experts to come in so that's the next generation of people but we want to take it a lot further than that. In a study done by ICT a couple years ago. They started to look at, why is it for example that that more women are not attracted, let's say to these technical fields. They realize that the STEM programs and STEM type of education needs to start much earlier than high school we need to go even to middle school or before. And for that we need to create programs around awareness around the importance of having solid robust digital infrastructure, not only in the subsea space but let's say in the communications and data center industry so the true benefit is that we're going to be able to have programs, awareness programs, educational programs, tutorials that are going to allow us to attract let's say the our generation of successors into the industry. So that's on the educational side of things. The other thing that that we announced that we're very, very proud of associated with the foundation is that we have received a grant from the Internet Society Foundation, and Nicole Straszłowiecki from NYU and her team and the global group are going to be looking at the greening of the subsea industry the greening of let's say cable landing stations and so on, to make a world that much more sustainable. So that is just the beginning of many of such programs that that we intend to approach around the aspects of sustainability of our industry. Amazing. We definitely need this yesterday. And I'm so much more hopeful for the future just based off of this conversation so sign us up we're here to help, of course, every time for you Eric. Thank you so very much Jamie and you know one of the things along these lines of building a community that we're working on a suboptic itself at the beginning of actually at the end of last year, launched our new community platform linked and type system and so I would like to invite all our members and future members to join us there and to continue the conversation around these topics that are so absolutely critical, let's say for our global communications fabric. Yeah, absolutely so for our viewers who want to learn more and get more involved, LinkedIn suboptic LinkedIn group is that it. It's actually, if you visit suboptic.org, it takes us to our community platform, and they're going to be able to see the different areas that we're focused on the presence of our working groups and information regarding the type of things that suboptic is involved in. Perfect suboptic.org. Eric, as always, it's such an honor. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Mahalo. Mahalo Jamie. Mahalo.