 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of Kataya, coming to you from Virtual Metro Connect 2021. Joining me today is Mr. Matt Briley. He's the SVP of Service Provider Sales of Light River. Matt, welcome to JSA TV. For sure, we've been very honored to interview Light River previously, but I believe this is your first time here on JSA TV. We're excited to have you tell our viewers if they don't know already a little bit about who Light River is. Sure, so Light River is very core. What we do is help our customers build better networks and get them deployed faster. And we really do that with three separate portions of the business. One is our hardware department and there we represent many different of the tier one hardware vendors in the network that you've seen. The CN is Cisco's, Nokia's. The second portion would be our deployment and integration services. And with our very unique deployment and integration methodology, we've been able to really keep a lot of our customers project either on schedule or ahead of schedule by deploying in a manner that we reduce our field time by 60%. And then the newest division in Light River is our software division. And that's really exciting to me because it wasn't there when I was at Light River previously. And it's really allowing our customers to manage their aging in-place networks as well as the networks we're deploying for them today on one ubiquitous platform. That is interesting. Well, let's talk about that software enhancement in just a second. But first, you mentioned you just recently rejoined Light River to lead that sales team in the service provider space. Can you tell us a little bit more about your history with Light River? Yeah, I'd love to. I initially met the guys at Light River back in the mid-2000s and they were actually a customer of mine. And then when I was transitioning out of hardware sales, Glenn asked me to come work for them. So in 2010, I joined Light River and was there for years and learned a lot and really enjoyed working with the team. But then Nokia came in and kind of pulled me out. They offered me a really interesting position in North America to run their optical business. And it was kind of a large position. And I felt it would really challenge me. I felt it was something I really needed to do. So I spent about four or five years there. And I've done a couple of things since then, but I find myself back at Light River now. And it's been really good. I kept in close contact with Mike Jonas and the team. Most of the time I was gone. But I really feel that I've learned a lot through that experience with Nokia. Everything from the mobile side of their business to the IP integration, kind of where the IP network design is going, things that I think will be very beneficial as I talk to our service providers and come back to Light River. And it's a much different company than when I left. In six years, the company has grown significantly. They've brought on the software team. And the things they're able to do for customers have really matured. And that brings us up to 2020-2021 here, which of course has been rather challenging several months for all of us. How did Light River continue to innovate through its product services, the software, while pivoting to all of the changes across the industry? Well, one of the great things with Light River is as the industry has been moving toward this open networking concept, Light River's had experience with all of the different vendors throughout the last, you know, almost 20 years. So working on multiple different vendor systems, especially for transport, is not new to us. Combined with the software we have now that will talk to these network elements directly, it puts us in a very unique position to not only help our customers transition to this, but with the shutdowns of a lot of our customers' labs not being open, it's put us in a place where as an essential service, we did remain open so we could set up remote testing sites or even execute test plans for our customers and allow them to continue to move forward, even though their physical offices were closed. Obviously, their networks weren't. So resiliency up and running even during these crazy times. And of course, the good sense to bring you back onto the team. A lot of great things going on. We also have to mention Alien Aware Networking. We had a really fabulous JSA TV there that folks should definitely check out. But tell us more about some other exciting developments that we might be watching Light River for this year. Sure. Again, one of the big things is open networking. And the thing that I really like about our software arm now is we use the same software platform to enable the Alien Aware Networking you've been talking about on open Rotom and open DWDM systems that we do to talk to some of the Tier 1 vendors who are no longer with us, the Nortels, the Tel Labs, Alcatel's, Ellucents. We can still manage all of those systems and almost all of our service provider partners anyway still have those systems in their network. So we've been doing a lot to work with those companies on a network transformation. In addition, our deployment side has gotten very creative in ways that they can help our partners speed up deployments. Typically, we do what's called a factory built network where we'll receive the equipment from a vendor. We'll build, test, label, set up that equipment in our factory and then we send it out with our deployment teams to deploy. What we've been able to do for some of our customers who have their own field deployment teams but don't necessarily have the time to train them on every new piece of equipment that comes out is we can do the build for them in the factory and then ship that pre-built to them for their field engineers to install. So it's more of a hybrid model. So we've been working with our customers to just find ways that we can help accelerate plans that they already have in place and maybe provide synergies and efficiencies that they wouldn't normally have available. I just love that. Truly, network transformation in a box, if you will. Right. Okay. For our viewers who definitely will want to know more information, where can they go? So you can obviously go to lightriver.com and several of us are registered for Metro Connect. You've got myself, Mike Jonas, I believe our CEO, Glenn Johansson. So you can click to have a meet with any of us at Metro Connect and we'd love to talk to you. Well, thank you, Matt. What a wonderful job. Thanks for all the great information here. Thank you, viewers, for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. And as always, happy networking.