 JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine, executive vice president at JSA coming to you from ITW 2020, the virtual ITW. And joining me today is Mr. Michael Kearns. Michael is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at Amartus. Michael, welcome to JSA TV. Thank you, Dean. Nice to talk to you today. Outstanding. Michael, thank you very much, Michael. Let's just go ahead and jump right in. For our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about Amartus? OK, so Amartus was founded in 2003. We're a specialist company in orchestration and automation for networking cloud. We deal with the business and technical negotiation software solutions. We work with providers and network providers, cloud providers, application providers, and also with the vendors. So we have a very unique perspective. We work across the whole ecosystem of the software automation. We are very much propellants of open, programmable DevOps style network transformation. And we're very much actively working within the MEPH and the TM Forum and CBAN organizations to drive forward the automation transformation of the industry. Excellent, Michael. Thank you. So I understand that you dropped some pretty significant news at the virtual ITW just this week. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about Embrace and the news that you had just come up this week? Sure, yeah, delighted to do that. Yeah, we've been working for the past couple of years on a product concept through our engagement with the industry through MEPH and with providers on what we call the East-West orchestration between providers, those inter-provider negotiation. This is a really hot topic right now because global enterprises, as they move their IT, IT environments and networks to adopt SD-WAN and have global reach, they want on-demand services. As they take up multi-cloud type IT environments, they need to have instant access to be able to connect their workforces to the actual digital assets and digital resources that they have globally. And traditionally, this type of activity was very static in nature, very difficult to negotiate between providers, took a lot of time and therefore wasn't very much compatible with the on-demand requirements of the enterprise. So we've been working with the standards bodies and with the providers to automate the negotiation of these services first. And it's actually a departure for us as a company. We typically have worked in the North-South automation so that's automating an individual provider. So this is something that we think is really a growing demand as we go forward in the industry and very much in line with the requirements of the enterprise, the future. So we're delighted to have announced the product. Now, congratulations Michael, that's great news. A word that you just said was future. Let's talk about that a little bit. But specifically the future of transformation and even more specifically the future of network transformation. Now, I know that Amartus is fast-tracking network transformation and doing so successfully. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the secrets to your transformation and about the way that you expedite that transformation with regard to the networks. So we see many ways in which the network transformation is taking place but let's talk about how the best approach is the best practices for the transformation. I think traditionally the operators have bought a lot of software solutions from OSS, BSS vendors. They found themselves locked in one way or another into those solutions, which meant that it was quite slow for them to evolve their actual processes. It was quite a heavy big project for them to be able to do that. So one big transformation that's happened is they're learning some lessons from the cloud providers and the OTT players so the network providers can adopt this DevOps style approach to transformation. They can, if they incorporate that with some of the standards work, they can really speed up the introduction of services, how they operate those services. They can take back some of that control that they had relinquished to maybe third parties or outsourced in order to cost cut in the past. And in order to be more agile if they take that back in and they achieve and they acquire the right technologies and the right approaches and processes for designing and rolling out and operating services, then they can be fast and they can move fast. And this is what they need to do in order to be able to meet the demands of the enterprise customers and the consumers that they're customers. Very good, look, I love it. I love it. Let's stay on that kind of prediction trajectory that we have going on. Why don't you talk to our viewers a little bit about what's on the horizon with regard to orchestration and automation of the network and cloud? Yeah, so if we take our example, I think a lot of providers today are already on a journey to automate their internal systems. This has been around for some time. We have a lot of providers down the road in that process. As we look a bit wider than that, then we sort of say, okay, how do people interface with those systems? How do their customers interface with the systems that they have? How do their partners interface so that they can open up their network to a global audience, a global customer base, a global supply chain? And we think that there's a lot of new technologies that are even going to enable this. So traditionally, the providers in our space, the wholesale kind of providers would be offering very much the similar kind of private line type services. But we've got things like SD-WAN now, which has come in. And SD-WAN is offering the enterprise some freedom from the VPN type scenario, allowing them to use different types of underlay services, such as IP broadband in conjunction with private line services. But SD-WAN is on demand. So the overlay is on demand, but the underlay is still lagging behind. So we need to give the automation to the provider so that they can really speed up the whole process of delivering the underlay and be more on demand. So the very first step has been that the providers themselves have been investing a lot in the internal automation of their internal systems. This is very critical. It's very critical that they move away from the sort of systems, the legacy systems, the BOSS systems that they relied on third parties to actually deliver the services. They need to take back the control of the environment, be able to introduce services in DevOps time frames, learn from the lessons of the large cloud providers who have been able to move quickly in this space. And then I think once they have achieved that, the next big thing is to open up their offering to the world in many different ways. And I think the embrace product that we have introduced will allow them to do that. It will allow them to engage in a global supply chain offering their services to a global marketplace. And this is very critical. And then within that, I think there are several steps. So there's, first of all, allowing the on-demand negotiation of those services between them and their partner providers or their customers. And then there's offering the capability to deliver those services in real time on their networks or in their clouds. Now we know cloud providers have had this capability for some time, but the network lags behind that capability. And I think as we move forward and we look at, new technologies that are coming on board, like 5G access, like Wi-Fi, we have this critical opportunity now to move away just from the fiber, the fixed fiber or the line that has an ordering time, has a time to dig up the roads and make connections. So it sometimes slows down the process. Now we can really deliver on-demand services. In the cloud, we have Edge Cloud. Edge Cloud is gonna play a really important part in delivering latency for the network but really high quality applications for the enterprise that they need. So all of these need to work together. They need to be globally accessible. They need providers need to be able to come together very easily, seamlessly to partner for short-lived services to be able to support the enterprise. So I think that the following stage beyond that is again hyper-automation of industries, autonomous driving, industry 4.0, smart cities. All of these need access to a lot of different digital resources and need to connect the people and the machines and they need to do it in real time. So, and they need to operate in real time without the human intervention. So I think this is the future. Maybe the latter is four or five years out for us, but it's something we need to develop the systems and put the systems in place today for that, you know? Yeah, you know, honestly, I feel like I should have booked four hours for this one today because there's so much we could unpack with all of that. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time. I know you're a busy guy. So Michael, for our viewers that do want to learn more, where should they go? So if you go to www.amartus.com forward slash embrace, embrace is the name of our product. It's about bringing part, providers together, enabling them to do business in seamless fashion. We have loads of resources there and we're building up more and more resources now that we've launched the embrace product this week, you know? Excellent. Michael, thank you very much for being with us today. We appreciate it. Thank you. Delays to talk to you also. Thank you. You got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV and tuning in to JSA Podcast. We'll see you soon.